'August-September 1972 (25th year) - U.K.: 26p - North America: i. - France: 3.40 F

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TREASURES

OF

WORLD ART

(J)

Photo © Musée des Antiquités Nationales, Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Lady of Brassempouy

This woman's head in ivory is one of the oldest sculptured reproductions of the human face.Named "The Lady of Brassempouy", from the site of the cave in south-west France where it wasdiscovered, this remarkable example of Perigordian culture dates back to between 20,000 and25,000 B.C. Men rarely figure in Palaeolithic art and even in cave paintings are usually depicted asstick-figures (see back cover) or covered with animal robes. "The Lady of Brassempouy" is now inthe Museum of National Antiquities, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. (See also p. 33.)

FRANCE

Il«Courier

AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1972

25TH YEAR

PUBLISHED IN 12 LANGUAGES

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Published monthly by UNESCO

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The UNESCO COURIER is published monthly, exceptin August and September when it is bi-monthly (11 issues ayear) in English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Arabic,Japanese, Italian, Hindi, Tamil, Hebrew and Persian. For listof distributors see inside back cover.

Individual articles and photographs not copyrighted maybe reprinted providing the credit line reads "Reprinted fromthe UNESCO COURIER," plus date of issue, and threevoucher copies are sent to the editor. Signed articles re¬printed must bear author's name. Non-copyright photoswill be supplied on request Unsolicited manuscripts cannotbe returned unless accompanied by an international replycoupon covering postage. Signed articles express theopinions of the authors and do not necessarily representthe opinions of UNESCO or those of the editors of theUNESCO COURIER.

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Editor-in-Chief

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1972

International

Book Year

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Managing Editors

: Ronald Fenton (Paris): Jane Albert Hesse (Paris): Francisco Fernández-Santos (Paris): Georgi Stetsenko (Paris): Hans Rieben (Berne): Abdel Moneim El Sawi (Cairo): Kazuo Akao (Tokyo): Maria Remiddi (Rome): Kartar Singh Duggal (Delhi): N.D. Sundaravadivelu (Madras): Alexander Peli (Jerusalem): Fereydoun Ardalan (Teheran)

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to the Editor-in-Chief

HOMO SAPIENS

By William Howells

20 MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF STONE AGE MAN

By François Bordes

PREHISTORIC INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

STONE AGE TOOLMAKER 1972

Photo report

OUR AFRICAN ANCESTORS

By Louis S.B. Leakey

OLDUVAI GORGE: PEEPHOLE INTO PREHISTORY

Photo report

CAVE WALL ART COMES TO MAN

By André Leroi-Gourhan

ANIMAL CAVALCADE BY PREHISTORIC ARTISTS

THE LONG JOURNEY OF THE PRIMATES

By John Napier

WHERE THE FIRST AMERICANS CAME FROM

Antarctica, Siberia or across the Pacific ?

By Juan Comas

EARLY MAN AND THE EMERGENCE OF RACES

By Vsevolod P. Yakimov

THE PUZZLE OF PEKING MAN

By Pierre Leroy

MAN, THE FIRST WALKIE-TALKIE

By Victor Bunak

OLD FOSSILS AND ANTEDILUVIAN THEORIES

By Louis S.B. Leakey and Vanne Morris Goodall

PILTDOWN MANA FOSSIL FORGERY

Photo report

THE FACE-MAKERS

Reconstructing the heads of our ancestors

By Mikhail Gerasimov

TEN MAJOR CONCLUSIONS

Unesco's Symposium on the origins of Homo Sapiens

BOOKS IN ENGLISH FOR FURTHER READING

TREASURES OF WORLD ART

Lady of Brassempouy (France)

THE EMERGENCE OF MAN

In the long progression towards Homosapiens, man's ancestors learned to makeand use different tools. Millions of such

tools are testimony to early man's skilland craftsmanship where the marriage offunction and design often gave birth toobjects of great beauty. Cover showsthree examples from the Palaeolithic andNeolithic periods: top an axehead; centrea laurel-leaf spearhead; bottom, atooth-edged blade.

3

Photo IBM. Paris

HIS issue is

devoted to a question whichhas aroused passionate ar¬gument and debate for manyyears: The Origin of Man.Recent research has provi¬ded new answers to manypuzzling aspects of thisquestion. A few years ago,Unesco convened an inter¬

national symposium on thesubject in collaboration withthe International Union for

Quaternary Research. Theproceedings have now beenpublished under the title"The Origin of Homo sap¬iens", produced for thespecialist (see bibliographyinside back cover). For thisspecial issue, the editors ofthe "Unesco Courier" have

called upon some of theleading authorities in thefield of palaeontology totrace the story of man's ori¬gins in simple language ac¬cessible to the layman. It isthe editors' hope that thetexts and illustrations will

help to make all readersmore familiar with man's

past and the long road thathas been travelled since the

19th century refused to be¬lieve that modern man ever

had any primitive ancestors.

4From "Early Man', courtesy Time-Life BooksDrawing Rudy Zallinger © 1965 Time Inc.

Ramapithecus, who is believed to be the earliest man-like primate. Heis said to have branched off from the apes over 14 million years ago. Hewas first identified from a fragment of jawbone found in India in 1934.

Homo sapiens;20 million yearsin the making

by William Howe/Is

ODAY we can almost pointto the first real "ancestor" of man.

By this ancestor I mean a creaturewho, among the evolving primates of20 million or more years ago, had justbranched off from the group of ournearest relatives, the apes a creature,still very much like an ape himself,whose descendants nevertheless

evolved continuously In a differentdirection from that point on. We arequite sure we have the fossil jawsof such a creature his name Is

Ramapithecus (named romantically forthe Indian god Rama)who livedabout 14 million years ago, and thestory of our knowledge of him is aninteresting story about science itself.

We have realized for some time that

man arose In this way, from animalsleading to the apes on one side andto ourselves on the other. After

Darwin's great book, "On the Originof Species", had made inevitable theacceptance of evolution (includinghuman evolution), Thomas Huxleyalmost at once showed how closely,in every way, we resemble the greatapes. He said, In fact, that they,the apes, are closer to us than theyare to monkeys.

This led to a lot of public jokesand private dismay, and the Idea wasresisted in many ways, by scientistsas well as others. But now, after a

hundred years, all the study of anatomyand, quite late, of such things as themolecular structure of proteins has

WILLIAM HOWELLS, of the United States,Is an International authority on prehistoricman. He Is professor of anthropology atHarvard University and a past president ofthe American Anthropological Association.Associate editor of 'Human Biology" and'American Naturalist", he Is widely knownfor his books on the story of man'semergence, many of which have becomebest-sellers (see bibliography, page 71).

only shown more and more positivelythat Huxley was right. Indeed we cango a step beyond Huxley and saythat apes of Africa, the gorilla andchimpanzee, are more closely relatedto man than is any of the three tothe orang-utang of Indonesia.

After Huxley's time, some anatomistspointed to the fact that apes areadapted in body form for brachiating,or hanging and swinging from theirarms. This is a particularly good andsafe way for a large animal to movein trees. Pointing also to our ownbroad shoulders and flat, broad

chests, as well as to details of ourelbow and wrist joints, and arrange¬ments of muscles, they argued that ourancestors were likewise adapted toa considerable degree for brachiation,and for life in trees. This was one

more argument for close relationshipto the apes.

Here again, other anatomists resist¬ed the idea, arguing that theresemblances were not very signi¬ficant, and perhaps had evolved Inparallel with the apes. They preferredto think of an ancestral line which

had been separate from apes, or evenmonkeys, for a very long time.(Always in the background thereseems to have been an unconscious

revulsion against relating ourselvesto chimpanzees, by people who lookedon them as "animals", not noticing howlarge-brained and intelligent thesesame animals really are.)

They had arguments: we do indeedstand upright, and our feet are verydifferent from an ape's; and our jaws

are now quite different, particularlywith small eye teeth which do notproject above the other teeth in theobvious way an ape's do. Could theselarger teeth have evolved backwardsto smaller ones? Could the hand-like

foot of an ape have been made overinto a human foot?

These difficulties are not as great

as they once seemed. Such changesare almost commonplace in animalevolution, with teeth being diminishedor lost, and limbs modified in drastic

ways. In addition, we must not tryto picture our common ancestor as

though he were a chimpanzee orgorilla; these animals have beenevolving too. As study has gone on,and fact is piled on fact, most anthro¬pologists have become convinced thatour forebears did indeed use trees like

the African apes, who actually livemore on the forest floor than in trees.

Still later, fossil jaws of the ancestralape Dryopithecus drew attention tothe very close likeness of the molarteeth in ourselves and apes. Thoughthe first specimen was found inFrance in 1856, it was during the earlypart of this century that such fragmentswere discovered in greater numbers,from fossil-bearing beds of Mioceneand Pliocene age, and in the timerange of about 20 million to 8 millionyears ago.

The fossils have come from other

parts of Europe and from India, andlater from East Africa, Georgia(U.S.S.R.) and China. With all this, theweb of evidence has drawn tighteraround our connexion with the apes.For Dryopithecus was evidently theancestor of the large apes, and hisremains are so widespread that we

can now hardly expect to find a newand different fossil group in the futurefrom which we ourselves might havecome.

Another important fossil "ape", J)Oreopithecus of Italy and East Africa,who lived at the same time, became

well known a few years ago. But,

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

TERTIARY PERIOD

MIOCENE

THE ROAD TO HOMO SAPIENS

Drawings on the next four pages show artist Rudy Zallinger's impressionof primate and human evolution. The drawings are reproduced with thekind permission of Time-Life Books, New York, and are taken from "EarlyMan", a richly illustrated volume in the "Life" Nature Library series whichyoung and old readers alike will enjoy (see bibliography, inside back cover).Above the figures is shown a time scale. The progression is not always strictlychronological since in certain cases considerable overlap existed. Proto-apesand apes were quadrupedal but are shown standing for comparison.

PLIOPITHECUS

An early proto-ape, it resem¬bled the modern gibbon al¬though its arms were not asdisproportionately long. Nowclassed as an ancestor of the

gibbon line. First fossil re¬mains found in 1834.

PROCONSUL

Once regarded as a directancestor of man, but now

considered as a very earlyape, the ancestor of thechimpanzee and perhaps ofthe gorilla. Numerous frag¬ments found in East Africa

add up to almost completeskeletons. A contemporary of"Pliopithecus".

DRYOPITHECUS

First of the fossil great apesto be discovered, its remains

have been unearthed through¬out Europe and in North Indiaand China. Fossils rangefrom about 20 million to 8

million years in age. Man isconsidered to have emergedfrom "Dryopithecus" stock.

OREOPITHECUS

A contemporary of "Dryopi¬thecus", it is believed to havestood about 4 ft. tall and

weighed about 80 pounds. Itsremains, discovered in Italyand Africa, led scientists towonder if it could be a direct

ancestor to man, but it is now

widely regarded as a sidebranch of the ape family.

6

20 MILLION YEARS (Continued)

while his body form was rather likea chimpanzee's, showing a similarkind of adaptation to trees in a relatedanimal, his teeth are quite differentfrom a chimpanzee's and from oursas well, a fact which only links ourdescent still more closely to the apesof Africa.

It was out of the Dryopithecus stockthat man emerged, and in fact it wasfrom among the fossils of Dryopithecusfossils that our ancestor Ramapithecusbecame known. G.E. Lewis of Yale

in 1934 described the first upper jaw,

found in India's Siwalik Hills, and

pointed to some man-like features.

Your own mouth will show you thesethings, where you can feel them withyour finger. Your dental arch is shortand rounded in front, while that of

apes has become increasingly longerand broad across the front, with

large canine teeth and broad incisors.Your molar teeth have the cusp andfurrow pattern of Dryopithecus, butare square; an ape's are longer. Thislength makes an ape's face projecting;yours is straighter:

Approaches to the human shapecould be seen in the small fragmentof Ramapithecus as though he hadjust set his foot on a path divergingfrom Dryopithecus, although unfortun¬ately we have not found the foot, onlythe Jaw. So Lewis thought Rama¬pithecus might belong in our ancestry.

But the tide of scientific opinionand such tides are apt to Influence,not facts, but the way we see factswas against Ramapithecus, and thefossil was put away in a drawer assimply one more kind of Dryopithecus.

QUATERNARY PERIOD.PLEISTOCENE

Drawings Rudy Zallinger © 1965 Time Inc

RAMAPITHECUS

Now considered by manyspecialists to be the oldestof man's ancestors in a direct

line. Probably still lived intrees and resembled ancestral

apes more than man.

A. AFRICANUS

The first hominid, this earlyform of "Australopithecus",

(or "Ape of the South") wasa biped, walked upright andwas able to run in the openplains. This major changefrom tree-hanging and usingthe arms when walking on theground (like apes) happenedsome time before 5 million

years ago.

,. ROBUSTUS

Though he stood upright andhad hominid features, "A.

Robustus" represents an evo¬lutionary dead end in man'sancestry. Dr. Leakey main¬tains that none of the Austra-

lopithecines can now be con¬sidered in a direct line with

the genus Homo (see p. 25).

ADVANCED

AUSTRALOPITHECUS

Possessed a bigger brain thanhis predecessors, was a bi¬pedal walker. A contemporaryof "A. Robustus". Primitive

tools discovered with both in

East Africa but which creature

produced them is not certain.Known as the Pebble Culture,

the tools are small stones

with only a few flakes.

After almost 30 years, however, L.S.B.Leakey found a very similar fossil atFort Ternan In Kenya, which he coulddate as being 14 million years old.

It happened that at the same time,Elwyn Simons at Yale was lookingonce again at Ramapithecus. He wasimpressed with what Lewis hadpointed to, and saw the same features

in Leakey's new specimen.

Perhaps more Important, Simonsrescued other pieces of Ramapithecusfrom burial in museum drawers. He

began examining old collections in

various places from the U.S.A. toIndia, and recognized a few morefragments with the same specialfeatures, fragments which hadpreviously been misnamed andignored, but which he identified asfossils of Ramapithecus.

This careful sorting out made iteasier to see the slight distinctionsbetween Ramapithecus on one handand Dryopithecus, ancestor of theapes, on the other. Thus we alsosee the beginnings of the separatingpaths of human and ape evolution,

or between animals properly calledpongids (apes) and those calledhominids (anything on the human sideof the same group). So palaeontologyis not all looking for fossils in oldriver banks.

What brought the split about?Evolution has "reasons" it follows

lines of successful adaptation butwe know so little about Ramapithecus

having only his jaws and teeth, thatwe cannot see the "reason". We

cannot simply say that it Is better ormore successful to be "human",

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

7

1 million years ago 250,000 years ago

HOMO ERECTUS

Usually referred to as the first"true man" of the genus Homo,but we now know that earlier

australopiths had many similartraits and also worked tools. He

knew the use of fire and pro¬duced the first true handaxe

(Abbevillian culture). First "Homoerectus" found was the famous

Java Man of 1891.

EARLY HOMO

SAPIENS ?

Far more advanced than "H.

erectus", includes Swanscombe

and Steinheim Man of Europe(250,000 years ago), probablythe earliest example of man'smodern species. His cutting im¬plements were standardized andfinely made (Acheulean culture).Acquainted with simple geomet¬rical forms.

SOLO MAN

Extinct race of "Homo sapiens"in Java. Known only from twoshinbones and skull fragments.Lived at the same time as Nean¬

derthal but his skull was more

primitive, more massive and

thicker with heavier brows, andcloser to "Homo erectus".

8

20 MILLION YEARS (Continued)

because that really means nothing,and Ramapithecus certainly resembledthe ancestral apes far more than heresembled man. Like some chim¬

panzee populations he seems to havelived In an open wood and, againlike chimpanzees, it is probable thathe was still a tree-user.

Professors Simons and Keith Jolly,however, think he had begun to differin diet from chimpanzees (who eatmuch coarse wild fruit) by usingtough but nutritious foods like nuts,seeds and hard roots. This is because

his teeth had thicker enamel than

an ape's, and showed signs of heavywear. He seems to have used his

molars as grinders, more than hisfront teeth, and this would be relatedto his shorter face.

Ramapithecus lived from some time

before 14 million years ago downat least as far as 8 million. Then,

simply because no fossils have yetbeen found, there is a gap in know¬ledge until 5 million years ago. Butsurprising changes must have takenplace: by this time much more obvious

human ancestors had appeared, andthey are fairly well known from thetime between about 4 million and

1.5 million B.C. Here also, however,

there was a long wait for recognitionin the face of doubt.

It was in 1924 that Raymond Dartin South Africa saw the first skull, ofa young child, in a box of fossilsbrought from Taung. He thought fromits face and teeth that it stood

halfway between man and ape, andhe named it Australopithecus ("apeof the south"). But he had not found

QUATERNARY PERIOD.

150,000 years ago 40,000 years ago

Drawings Rudy Zalllnger © 1965 Time Inc.

RHODESIAiM MAN

Lived in southern Africa, per¬haps at same time as SoloMan in Java. Certain author¬

ities believe he may havebeen alive as recently as30,000 years ago and actuallyhave overlapped with modern

NEANDERTHAL MAN

Lived 150,000 to 35,000 years

ago not only in Europe butalso in Africa, Middle East

and Far East. Made a varietyof tools of advanced design.Classic European Neanderthalman is now excluded by manyscientists from the direct

Homo sapiens" line.

CRO-MAGNON,UPPER CAVE

AND BOSKOP MAN

Cro-Magnon lived in Europe,Boskop in Africa and UpperCave Man in China. Althoughmost research in the pastwas concentrated in Europeand concerned Cro-Magnonman, recent studies are

beginning to throw more lighton the African and Mongoloidancestors.

MODERN MAN :

HOMO SAPIENS

SAPIENS

Two schools of thought todayexist regarding modern man'srecent ancestors: the mono-

centric believes that today'sraces had a common ancestor;

the polycentric sees themdescending from differentancestral lines.

and we never do find a complete

skeleton, adult, and exactly dated;and his colleagues rejected his idea,believing this juvenile, still with itsmilk teeth, to be merely an interest¬ing new ape. Much later, and slowly,did the many finds arrive whichshowed that Dart himself had been

too cautious. (The further fossils were

found years ago by Dart and RobertBroom In South Africa. New ones

are found every year, greatly addedto by discoveries In East Africa byDr. and Mrs. Leakey (at Olduvai

Gorge) and their son Richard (in north¬ern Kenya) as well as by ProfessorsCamille Arambourg and F. ClarkHowell.)

In the jaws of these australopithe-cines, the large (but human) backteeth also strongly suggest powerfulchewing for tough foods. The frontteeth (canines and incisors) weresmall and entirely hominid in nature,not something partly ape-like. Forseveral million years there were twolines of these australopiths: Australo¬pithecus, barely the size of a modern

African pygmy, and Paranthropus, whowas a little larger but had jaws aspowerful as a gorilla's, though thejaws were short and deep (for grind¬ing with the back teeth), not long,with a gorilla's large canines (forstripping forest vegetable food).

The australopiths, we know, werebipeds like modern man, capable ofrunning In the open plains. Their hipand leg bones differ from ours todayin some ways, showing that they wereless efficient walkers. Nevertheless,

some time before 5 million years ago

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

9

20 MILLION YEARS (Continued)

No knuckling under to run faster

10

they had passed a major milestone ofchange, from tree-hanging, and fromusing the arms when walking on theground (like apes), to a free uprightgait on an arched foot with an erecttorso. Apes can walk this way butpoorly: their feet are flat, their greattoes protrude and do not help inpushing forward, their knees will notstraighten (except in orangs), and theirlong, high pelvic bones make themtop-heavy.

"O we now know that defi¬

nite hominids go back before 5 millionB.C., while at the same time our

strong likeness to the African apesmeans that we have a common ances¬

tor at a time not too remote. Ramapi¬

thecus looks like the beginning of ourline, and if he seems very ape-like wemust remember that it Is the human

side, not the ape, which has been

changing most rapidly. We can besure our ancestors abandoned trees

and a diet of fruit and coarse vegeta¬ble matter, perhaps only in the last10 million years or less.

The reasons why we became bipedsare far from clear, though many havespeculated. Even now we cannot runvery fast: on uneven ground a gorilla,using the knuckles of his hands inrunning, can go as fast. We can,however, cover long distances inhunting, but could the first bipeds doso? Carrying food in the arms to asafe eating place might have encour¬aged uprightness: so might the needof a small animal to rise and peerover tall grass.

Perhaps, in our tree life, we became

adapted to uprightness, as did apes,but not to such a degree that, as inapes, a heavy torso and long armsencouraged throwing part of ourweight on our arms. Perhaps severalsuch factors combined; we cannot say.But bipeds we were by about 5 millionyears ago, with important changesstill going on in hip bones and feetto make this kind of gait moreeffective (see photos pages 42-43).

The australopiths are our undoubt¬ed ancestors at that time; thereare no other possible candidates.

Once again, there is controversyover the actual path of evolution.Some think there was only one variedspecies of australopith, not two

distinct lines. And in former days itwas assumed that there must have

been a "cerebral rubicon", a magicbrain size of about 750 cubic centi¬metres below which an ancestor couldnot be "human".

But simple stone tools, which areover two million years old, have nowbeen found near Lake Rudolf in East

Africa. They could have been madeonly by the australopiths since nomore "advanced" men are known to

have existed then; and the brains of

these austrapoliths were not largerthan a chimpanzee's. So shaped stonetools did not wait for "man" to make

them, and it is thought likely that toolsactually helped the australopiths tobecome "man", by accenting theevolutionary advantages of skilfulhands and larger brains (1).

At any rate, this was the nextmajor step, the advent of Homo

erectus. His appearance, about. 1 mil¬lion B.C., probably follows anothersmall gap in the record which mightmake the difference from Australo¬

pithecus more obvious. "Homo", anew genus, recognizes the difference,and the new group. Also Homoerectus is commonly spoken of asthe first "true man", but it is not clearthat such an expression is justified,since many of his traits were alreadypresent in the australopiths, who werealso working tools at an earlier time.

These new men, however, musthave presented an appearance morelike our own. In body size, and ingeneral features of the skeleton, theywere much the same as ourselves.

The head also would have looked more"human", with a smaller face and with

jaws dominated at last by the brain-case. However, this braincase was

thick, and brain size had come onlyhalf the way from australopiths tomodern man.

The first Homo erectus to be found

was the famous Java man (originallynamed Pithecanthropus), of 1891. Hecaused a scientific explosion, as thefirst really primitive man to cometo light, and even his own discoverer

came to think that he was really alarge tree-living ape. He reignedvirtually alone (very recently five newexamples of his skull have been

found) until the Peking men of northChina were discovered, but Homoerectus is now recognized from East

and North Africa, and In Hungary(Vertesszollos) and Germany (theHeidelberg jaw).

We know little about the transitionto Homo erectus, or where it took

(1) Some of these same australopiths, be¬fore the tools were found, had already beenclassed by Leakey and others as very early'men', or Homo and, following a suggestionof Professor Dart, were named Homo habi-lis, with the sense of being 'good with thehands". We shall come back to this.

place. Writers like to argue for eitherAfrica or Asia as the "home of man",but this may not be important. Rama¬pithecus probably reached India fromAfrica 10 million years ago at least,and after that there must have been

hominids in both continents, at thestage of Australopithecus. It happensthat their remains so far have been

found mostly in Africa, in favourablespots like Olduvai Gorge.

We have a few suggestions of whatoccurred. The large-jawed Paran-thropus seems to have changed hardlyat all during three million years ormore. The site of Swartkrans, inSouth Africa, yielded many of hisknown fossil parts. It also providedtwo or three jaw fragments, of thesame age, which Broom and Robinsontwenty years ago believed to bedifferent from Paranthropus, and moreadvanced in form. They christenedthe type "Telanthropus", though Rob¬inson later decided that the partsbelonged to Homo erectus. In eithercase, two different hominids were

there together, one being Paranthro¬pus and the other a more advanced

kind. Here is a powerful argumentfor the real existence of two differentforms at the same time.

few years ago, by analmost magic piece of luck, three menwere looking over these and otherfragments in the collections in Pre¬toria when they noticed broken edgeswhich could be fitted together to makelarger pieces, where this had not beenseen before.

They were able to join the "Telan¬thropus" upper jaw to much of a face,an ear region, and a bit of forehead.

(Palaeontology, I said, is not just amatter of looking in river banks.)This gave most of the face and frontof the skull, to which the lower jaw of"Telanthropus" would have been a

fairly good fit. The whole thingsuggests Homo even more stronglythan before, but seems to be toosmall in size.

At about the same time Mrs. Leakeyfound a small crushed skull in the

lowest levels of Olduvai Gorge, be¬low the well-known Zinjanthropus (aParanthropus) and dated to not quitetwo million years. This was only thelatest in a series of similar finds fromOlduvai, all of which had been calledHomo habilis by Leakey and hisassociates. Though fragmentary, theywere obviously not Paranthropus,having higher skulls and smaller jaws,and to many they suggested the

a Homo sapiens-i Neanderthal

PithecanthropusA Homo habilis

O Australopithecusx Ramapithecus

Some of the principal sites at which fossil remains have been found. Mapprepared under the supervision of Professor J. Piveteau, Director of the Lab¬

oratory of Human Palaeontology, Faculty of Sciences, Paris.

smaller South African form Australo¬

pithecus.

After a great deal of work, the newskull was put together. This and thereconstructed "Telanthropus" give usa better picture: they are somewhatmore advanced than the known Austra¬

lopithecus but are still very small forHomo. They may well be showingus the ancestor who had just begun tomake stone tools and who, in the nextmillion years, turned into Homo.

Again, controversy. Some prefer tocall this little person Homo habilis, inthe belief that both Australopithecusand Paranthropus became extinct, andthat this graceful little creature dev¬eloped directly into high-skulled,large-brained Homo sapiens withoutpassing through the stage of low¬browed, thick-skulled Homo erectus.

But this raises the problem of whomight have been the ancestor ofHomo habilis, unless it was Australo¬pithecus, whom he greatly resembles;and also the problem of why remainsof only Homo erectus have beenfound for the period immediately after.

It seems safer to assume, for the

present, that the Australopithecus linebegan making simple tools nearly2 1/2 million years ago and, duringa time from which we have almost

no fossils, grew larger in size andadvanced to the erectus stage, whileParanthropus continued contentedlymunching coarse vegetable food withhis great jaws, ignoring tools, untilhe became extinct.

If the first Homo erectus to be found,the Java Man, was considered in the1890s to be very subhuman, we knowbetter now. In Africa, and evidentlyin Europe, he made large stone hand-axes, or coups de poing, increasinglywell-shaped in comparison with theearlier pebble tools.

We do not really know about howhe used them. All we can say is thathe occupied the warmer parts of theOld World for at least half a million

years (and even some cool places inEurope and China), as the majorglacial periods were beginning; andthat in this time he showed some

evolutionary progress in brains which

became larger and skulls and jawswhich became less massive.

At the moment, he may now seemmore like a well-defined "stage" thanhe should, because we not only lackfossils from the period just before,but also have very few from thehundreds of thousands of years follow¬ing the second (Mindel) glaciation.Change doubtless went on by smallsteps during these times, but wecannot see the steps just now.

The Swanscombe and Steinheim

skulls, of the Second Interglacial,perhaps 250,000 years ago, and thenew Tautavel skull from the early ThirdGlacial, are important. They are muchadvanced over the known erectus men,

but they are still too few to help usmuch, or show what was happeningworldwide. It is only in the Third In¬terglacial and the last, or Fourth Gla¬cial, mainly within the last 100,000years, that we come again to a wealthof fossil men, and to the Neanderthal

problem, the greatest controversy ofall.

When the first of the Neanderthals

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

11

20 MILLION YEARS (Continued)

Neanderthal man, father or distant cousin ?

12

was reported in 1856, he too wasthought to be subhuman by some, butonly an exceptional modern man, pos¬sibly a diseased person, by others (thefirst controversy, now forgotten). ANeanderthal skull is indeed excep¬

tional, being very long and low, with acontinuous protruding bony browridgeacross the forehead containing well-developed sinuses or air spaces. Butthe skull contours are not those of

Homo erectus, and the brain was at

least as large as our own.

Neanderthal man's face was equally

remarkable; it was long, protrudingsharply forward In the midline from thetop of the nose on down. Had hisnose not been so broad we might callhim "hatchet-faced", but modern "hat¬chet-faced" north Europeans are aptto be tall and slender, while the Nean¬

derthals of Europe were short andstocky.

'ONTROVERSY over pri-mitiveness and antiquity did not lastlong. Today we know that Neander¬thal man occupied Europe in the ThirdInterglacial and much of the FourthGlacial periods (perhaps between150,000 and 35,000 B.C.), and that hewas the author of the Mousterian va¬

rieties of retouched flake stone tool,which were technically far advancedover something like a handaxe. Thesetools in some ways foreshadowedthose of the Upper Palaeolithic, whichwere made from bladelike flakes and

were used by Cro-Magnon man amongothers.

For a hundred years now, discov¬eries of skeletons of the EuropeanNeanderthals have given rise to aconception of his "classic" form as I

have described it. They have alsoreinforced the conclusion that he gaveway, with seeming abruptness, about35,000 B.C. to men who were entirelymodern in physique, though robust,and who were in fact like living Euro¬peans.

This is the heart of the modern con¬

troversy, with strong opinions on bothsides. I have stated the distinctive¬

ness of Neanderthal man too simplyand sharply, in order to begin with acontrast. In North Africa there were

other Neanderthal-like men, more mod-en. in some ways, lacking the typi¬cal facial projection of the Europeans.They too were followed by modernmen of rugged build, apparently com¬ing from the east about the same time(35,000 B.C.), or perhaps earlier.

The Near East is more puzzling.Men with Neanderthal faces, and

with Neanderthal peculiarities of theskeleton, existed in the earlyFourth Glacial, with Mousterian tools.But their skulls were not as "classic"

as the Europeans, and some of them

were remarkably tall, like the Amudman of Israel, found by Japaneseexcavators. (Here we must rememberthat modern men vary greatly Scotsand Eskimos might be compared tothese Neanderthals in body size.)

The argument is over whether theNeanderthals, in Europe or elsewhere,were in fact replaced by invaders, withreally new Upper Palaeolithic methods

of tool-making, in a brief period (afew thousand years); or whether theNeanderthals simply evolved into mod¬ern man on the spot, while his stone-working, adopting new techniques,made the changes from what is termedMousterian to what is termed UpperPalaeolithic.

It Is a complex argument, and isbased partly on assumptions (and, Ibelieve, partly on tides of scientificopinion, like older arguments). Inspite of all that is known, ways ofconvincing opponents have not been

found. Some archaeologists empha¬size transition in tool-making. Otherarchaeologists grant that there are im¬portant Mousterian survivals in the

early Perigordian culture of the upperPalaeolithic of France. But they see aclear break with the coming of asecond culture, the Aurignacian, whichhas different tool-making techniquesand also a wealth of decorative

objects previously lacking. This theyview as something entirely new, anintrusion; and they cannot imagine asimple cultural evolution.

Similarly, some anthropologists can¬not imagine biological evolution soswift as to produce a modern faceand skull from that of Neanderthal

Man in a few thousand years. Othersare doubtful about the shortness of

the period, and emphasize intergrad¬ation in shape between Neanderthal

and modern man, especially in the east.They hold that evolution, not replace¬ment, presents fewer difficulties. Theynote that if there was an invasion, thesource of the "modern" Upper Palaeo¬lithic men has not been found and that,if the European Neanderthals are ratherspecial, the Near Eastern Neanderthals

are more intermediate and "progres¬sive".

These scholars would paint a rathersimple picture of human history, prob¬ably too simple. They suggest thatthere was everywhere a "Neanderthalphase" of human evolution in the last

glacial period, out of which all of usEskimos and Scots alike emerged

as modern man. This broad view as¬

sumes that there were Neanderthal

men everywhere in the Old World, asthere certainly were throughout Eur¬ope and apparently around its edges.

Carleton Coon, in a well known

book, "The Origin of Races", hasargued for another theory somethinglike this one. Modern races appearedin different parts of the Old World,not from a single Neanderthal phaseor Neanderthal population, but fromdifferent races of Homo erectus

already present in these places.

There are difficulties here, but thetheory does recognize something im¬portant which the other scholars neg¬lect: that there were other kinds of

Ice Age men, such as Solo Man of Javaand Broken Hill Man ("RhodesianMan") of southern Africa, who hadsome of the primitive traits of

Neanderthal man but were reallyquite different. They are less wellknown: they are discoveries, orfacts, which are still hard to interpret.Solo Man, though living at the sametime as the Neanderthals, had a muchthicker and cruder skull, more likeHomo erectus.

There is a final chapter to all this.What do we know about modern man

himself? Living races seem very dif¬ferent, some with very dark skin, somewith blond hair, some with narrowed

eye openings. But in form of skull(and this is what we can compare withearly man) they are really much alike,with smaller faces and higher, narrow¬er bralncases. This is my own conclu¬sion, after having worked with skullsfrom all parts of the globe. I believe,as do many colleagues, that all musthave some common source. But

where, and when?

H1ERE we are In a shadow-

land lighted by too few discoveries.Outside of Europe, where we observethe disappearance of NeanderthalMan, remains are especially scanty.Nevertheless, striking recent findsseem to mean that Homo sapiens ofour own kind existed elsewhere, inAfrica and Asia, in the same periodas the Neanderthals of Europe.

They are different from those "pro¬gressive" Neanderthals I spoke of.Several skeletons from Jebel Qafzeh,in Israel, have no radiocarbon date butcome from cave levels in which thetools and the soils indicate a time

fairly early in the last glacial period,probably well before 40,000 years ago.

And the skulls are surprisingly modernnot completely so, but being quite

different from Neanderthals. Only the

large bony brows, and perhaps largerfront teeth, in some of them, suggestNeanderthal Man, and others of thetribe had quite small teeth, and small¬er, modern brows and faces as well,as far as Is now known.

Two skulls found by Richard Leakeyin Kenya, of modern form or close toit and not Neanderthal are surelyolder than 37,000 years. Some autho¬rities think they may be very mucholder. For to the east a skull from the

Niah Cave in Sarawak (Borneo) hasbeen dated by two methods to about40,000 BC, and it looks like a Melane-sian or possibly an Australian.

I ODERN men of the same

general kind had made the difficultwater crossings (difficult for earlymen) to Australia before 30,000 B.C.,and many recent discoveries attestthe presence of such people there andin New Guinea over the next ten

thousand years. In the New World,recent finds prove the Indians were inSouth America about 20,000 years ago,much earlier than had been generallybelieved, so that men had come to the

Americas from Asia probably severalthousand years before. No Americanskeletons are as old as this, but we

can only suppose that these earliermen were like the later.

Now here is the important thing.All the known skeletons I have men¬

tioned were of modern form. In

addition, the European Upper Palaeo¬lithic people had the nature of laterEuropeans; the early Australians wererecognizably like later Australians orMelanesians; and we can only supposethat the first Indians of America were

the same kind of proto-Mongolold wesee In them today.

The Omo skulls of Africa cannot be

recognized yet, and otherwise thereare no African skulls quite so old.

But the signs are that, by the time theNeanderthals vanished, or before, not

only was modern man fairly wides¬pread, but the races we see today hadalready taken shape.

We still cannot say how this happen¬ed. It is strange that we shouldknow so little of our nearest ancestors.

But we cannot expect to have thewhole story after only one century ofsearching. There are blank parts ofour history now, but they will be filled:we have hundreds of years of ex¬ploration ahead of us.

The

life and times

of

Stone Age manby François Bordes

14

'ISCOVERIES in Africa in¬

dicate that the Old Stone Age, orPalaeolithic period, began more thantwo million years ago. The first stone-worker was Australopithecus, half¬way between the great apes (gorillas,chimpanzees, orang-utangs) and our¬selves, with a still rudimentary brain.His tools were simply pebbles, chip¬ped to give them a cutting edge, androughly trimmed flakes.

The evolution of man and his indus¬

tries took place over a very longperiod. Pithecanthropus knew how touse fire, at least in China, and produc¬ed the Abbevillian and early Acheuleanindustries, traces of which are found

in various parts of the world. Little isknown of the various types of man in

the Middle and Upper Acheuleanperiods; and finally, about 100,000years ago, Homo sapiens emerged.

A distinction used to be made be¬

tween Neanderthal man, Homo nean-

dertalensis, associated with the Mous¬terian culture, and modern man Homo

sapiens, of the Upper Palaeolithic age.

FRANÇOIS BORDES Is professor of Pre¬history and director of the laboratory ofQuaternary Geology and Prehistory at theUniversity of Bordeaux and director of Pre¬historic Antiquities for the Aquitaine regionof France. An Internationally famous auth¬ority on Palaeolithic tools, he can himselfmake all the known varieties of Palaeolithic

Implements (see photo story page 22 andbibliography Inside back cover).

The trend today is to establish twosub-species, Homo sapiens neander-talensis and Homo sapiens sapiens.

The exact relationship betweenthese two fairly different types Is stilla matter of controversy. It Is possiblethat there were intervening links, mod¬ern in some respects and Neander-thaler in others and the evolution of

modern man must have taken place

more or less simultaneously through¬out the ancient world. Men of a pre¬

sent-day type existed as far back asthe Mousterian period (as shown byexcavations at Djebel Qafzeh in Israeland perhaps even before).

For the last 100,000 years, men havelived in very different environments,the result of geography or climatic va¬riations. Such variations were particu¬

larly marked In the Quaternary or lastof the geological eras: several timeshuge glaciers spread over not onlyGreenland and the Antarctic (whereone can see their vast traces today)but also Scandinavia, North America

and all high mountains, even at theequator. At their maximum, the Scan¬dinavian glaciers covered the north ofGermany, most of England, and a greatpart of the western U.S.S.R., while inFrance the Alpine glaciers came downalmost to Lyons.

These- Ice Ages were matched byoscillations when the earth's tempera¬

ture fell, though the maximum cold didnot necessarily coincide with the maxi

mum glaciation. Depending on theperiod and the place, the cold wouldbe damp or dry, and In the regions tothe south of the glaciers a variety ofvegetation developed, ranging fromtundra to forest.

In Europe, however, the prevailingfeature was more or less denselywooded steppes. This lowering oftemperature naturally extended beyondtoday's temperate zones, but tropicaland equatorial regions seem to havebeen little affected, though dependingon the amount of rainfall there were

periods when deserts spread or shrankalmost to nothing.

The accumulation of water locked up

in the huge glaciers (islandsis) meantthat the level of the seas went down

considerably, sometimes more than300 feet, with inevitable geographicalchanges. England was a part of thecontinent, and Japan was attached toAsia. Our ancestors thus lived In a

changing world (even if the changeswere only gradual) frequently verydifferent from the world we know.

Throughout this period tool-makingdepended primarily on stone as thebasic tool for shaping other tools fromwood, bone, antler, horn, leather, etc.These have all disappeared, with theexception of those in bone and antler,which have often been preserved.

Those who know nothing of thesubject often speak slightingly of

CONTINUED PAGE 16

Painting by Zdenek Burlan © Artla, Prague

A roving band of Neanderthalers, who lived about 100,000 years ago andvanished about 35,000 B.C. This painting by the Czech artist Zdenek Burlanappears In "Prehistoric Men", published in Prague, Czechoslovakia, whichis made up in major part of paintings by Mr. Burlan with an introductorytext by J. Agusta.

STONE AGE MAN (Continued)

The myth of the troglodyte 'cave men'

Palaeolithic man and his "clumsy flinttools". In fact, he was a consummatecraftsman who made the best of his

material. If many of his implementsappear crude, it is because ^-flint,though easily flaked by a skilfulworkman, has a fragile cutting edgewhich wears away quickly, or ratherwhich chips; flint is harder than steel,as you will see if you scratch the bladeof a knife with a piece of flint. Othertools or weapons, designed for lastinguse or requiring a perfect ' form forfunctional * reasons, were admirablywell shaped.

Not all tools were of flint. In some

regions flint does not exist and wasreplaced by obsidian (volcanic glass)which has a still sharper, though morefragile cutting edge, quartzite, sand¬stone and quartz, which is more in¬

tractable, but for which the right work¬ing techniques had been evolved.

In other areas, fine-grained eruptiverocks were used, such as basalt andrhyolite. Tools were often a variedcollection, the finer ones in flint or vol¬

canic glass, the rougher ones in basalt,quartz or quartzite; the choice ofmaterial depended on the use to whichthe tool was to be put.

For flaking stone, man first used ano¬ther pebble; later, from the Middle

Acheulean period onwards, he realizedthat better results could be obtained

with a softer striking tool, or hammer,of a cylindrical shape, in wood, boneor antler. Perhaps during the Moust¬erian age, but certainly in the UpperPalaeolithic, he began striking by indi¬rect Impact, placing a wooden or bonechisel between the hammer and the im¬

plement to be shaped. He also usedpressure flaking, which permits finerand more regular retouches, thoughsmaller than those produced by strik¬ing. In the Solutrean period, about19,000 years B.C., man discovered thatstrong heat applied slowly to flint, fol¬lowed by a slow cooling process,changed the structure of the stone andmade it easier to flake by pressure.

In the Upper Palaeolithic age menhollowed out limestone to make blub¬

ber lamps, sometimes decorated, butthey did not, to our knowledge, fashionvases, which did not appear until con¬siderably later. A distinction is fre¬quently drawn between the Palaeo¬lithic (The Old, or chipped Stone Age)and the Neolithic (the New, or polish¬ed Stone Age). But, apart from thefact that Neolithic man chipped stonefar more than he polished it, artifactsin polished stone are by no means un¬known in Palaeolithic times (for exam¬ple in Central Europe); and partly pol

ished axes have even been found in

northern Australia, pre-dating those ofEuropean Neolithic by some 15,000years.

Since the great bulk of artifacts inperishable material have not come

down to us, our ideas about the dailylife of our far-off ancestors are based

mainly on the examination of bone andstone implements, the study of depo¬sits, and a comparison with primitivepeoples of today or recent times. Incold regions, our ancestors livedmainly by hunting, eked out by fish¬ing, and, if the climate was suitable,the gathering of berries, seeds androots. In warmer climates it is pos¬sible that fruit-gathering was a majorfood resource as it is today for thebushmen of the Kalahari Desert.

Living patterns were not the samefor the Middle Palaeolithic (the Mou¬sterian and similar industries), domi¬nated by Neanderthal man, and theUpper Palaeolithic, by which timemodern man has emerged. There arehowever a certain number of constant

factors.

As regards living quarters, peopleoften talk about "cave men" as if pri¬mitive men led a purely troglodyteexistence. In fact, they lived chiefly

BIG GAME

HUNTERS

OF THE PAST

A group of Neanderthal hunters(right) drive Ibex over a cliff to bedespatched by other hunters waitingbelow. The more advanced UpperPalaeolithic men, who superseded theNeanderthals, dug camouflagedpits near watering-places totrap mammoth and rhinoceros(opposite page).

.aaaafl alaafll '

m t^^^ "JIB aaCte^H

M^-^ «á

aaf> ^^^ _ %

*V* t a ^ar a^aatt A ai aaaF ^aa

flaaaaaaaaT MaMH ^T ' fl

1 1 V jfl

^BL^E. ,4,

mmlaaaaaaaaaaaaaHlKA ' .«B

at the entrance to caves, or under

overhanging sandstone, limestone orbasalt rocks hollowed out by erosion.But these would have provided verypoor shelter from the intense cold ofthe Ice Ages if they had not beensuitably fitted up with skin tents orhuts. Occasionally one finds tracesof the uprights which supported the.roof, or circles or rectangles of stoneswhich indicate the foundations.

In or near these huts are to be found

hearths, sometimes merely places forlighting a fire, marked by reddenedstones and ashes. Elsewhere, thereare more elaborate hearths small cir¬

cles of stones, or hearths floored with

pebbles which were perhaps used forcooking; the fire heated the pebbles,

which were then swept clear of embersand ash, and the meat was roasted

directly on the floor.

Other hearths are full of stones

which have been split by the heat.One can visualise two ways in whichthey were used. Either the stones, pla¬ced directly in the fire, accumulatedheat and then radiated it when the

fire was extinguished, or alterna¬tively, when hot they were taken outwith wooden tongs and thrown intoa leather bag containing water, to makethe water boil and produce a meatstock. The Eskimos use this tech¬

nique today.

In warm regions, caves and shel¬ters were probably fitted out more

simply, with wind screens instead ofhuts. Open air camps probably re¬sembled those of the bushmen or

Australian aborigines, with screens orhuts made from branches. In rainyareas, protection was provided by aroof of leaves or thatch.

Open-air camps are however alsofound in cold regions, either in areaswhere t there are no caves, or elseused as transient camps for the sum¬mer. Many of these camps are in Cen¬tral Europe and the U.S.S.R. Theyrange from the simple round familyhut partly hollowed out of the earth,the walls reinforced with the bones

of large animals, to the large commu¬nity dwellings in the Don area, possi¬bly corresponding to the "long

CONTINUED PAGE 20

17

PREHISTORIC INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Painting Zdenek Burlan © Artla, Prague

The woolly rhinoceros was a dangerousquarry to tackle at close quarters. Topierce his thick hide from a safedistance, early man developed spear

throwers which gave added penetratingpower to his spear. Photos right andtop left show fragments of late Magda-lenian (10,000 B.C.) spear throwersmade from reindeer antlers and carved

to represent a bison licking Its flankand two Ibex in an attitude of play orcombat Early man was a fisherman aswell as a hunter. Top right, barbedMagdalenian harpoons and, left, de¬corative carving of reindeer and salmon,two Important Items in early man's diet.

19

STONE AGE MAN (Continued)

Tools and artifacts for every occasion

houses" of the Red Indians in the

eastern United States.

Such open-air camps also existed inFrance in Mousterian and Upper

Palaeolithic times. In general, the onlyindications of the Mousterian camps

are sites thickly scattered with chip¬ped flints, debris, burnt stones andremains of bones. Upper Palaeolithiccamps are well organized; frequentlymarked by a series of post holes toshow where huts or tents stood, and

positioned on small spurs overlookingtwo valleys, where possible on flatsandy soil. The reason will be clearto anyone who has ever camped.

w

20

HILE the large dwellingsIn eastern Europe were probablypermanent living quarters, the equi¬valent of the non-existent cave, thesimpler ones in the west were most

likely hunting or summer camps. Fromthe fact that the tool kits found there

are not basically different from cavetools of the same period, it can bededuced that the hunting expeditionsincluded women, who were respon¬sible for dressing skins and smokingmeat.

It is possible that Palaeolithic manled a semi-sedentary life in the sensethat the caves were inhabited all the

year round by part of the group, anda^ semi-nomadic life in the sense thathunting expeditions were divided upinto temporary camps. The same istrue for bushmen today: sometimesthe tribe lives all together, at othersit breaks up Into little groups.

As regards clothing, comic strips orillustrated novels often show prehis¬toric man with only the skin of ananimal round his loins. This mayhave been the case during warmperiods or on fine summer days, andof course in tropical areas where clo¬thing was perhaps even more redu¬ced. But for life in an ice age, parti¬cularly in winter, a costume similar tothat of the Eskimos is much more

likely, considering that the temperaturemust often have been below minus 40degrees.

The bone needle was only inventedin the Upper Solutrean age around17,000 or 16,000 B.C.but while it isa help to sewing it is not indispens¬able. Earlier tool kits include bonepoints and flint drills with which it Iseasy to make holes in a hide. Threadwas provided by vegetable fibres or

the tendons of animals, in the sameway as tendons of reindeer are used

today by Arctic peoples.There is also no doubt that Stone

Age man had shoes, probably likemoccasins, even though the footprintsfound In caves are all of naked feet.

Tool kits varied from one period toanother and from one industry to ano¬ther, probably corresponding to diff¬erent populations. They also devel¬oped over the ages inside the sameindustry.

In the Mousterian age, stone toolkits are the overwhelming majority ofthe artifacts preserved, and are mainlyof flint flakes. They Include a varietyof scraping tools flakes with one ormore edges trimmed to make themeven. They may have been used forscraping hides, and certainly as knivesand for woodworking. In addition,there are notched pieces, flakes withtoothed edges like saws, scrapers,burins or gravers, borers, backedknives made from elongated flakes orblades with one edge broken off tomake it possible to lay a finger alongit (as with the blade of a modernknife).

Among some varieties of Mouste¬rian tools, there are still hand axes or

"coups-de-poing", multiple purposetools, as in the preceding Acheuleanage. Bone tools are no more thansplinters with the end worn down

(perhaps for making clothing) or boneswhich show signs of having beencrushed, which may have been pres¬sure tools for trimming flint.

II N the Upper Palaeolithicage tool kits were more varied andspecialized. A small number of side

scrapers subsisted, to be replaced byvarious kinds of end scrapers. Thenumber and variety of gravers increas¬ed considerably, probably partly dueto bone working, which became veryimportant. Borers, backed blades and

bladelets also play a role, but theirpurpose is not always clear. Bonetools Included points, smoothing toolsfor sleeking hides, and towards theend, needles.

Weapons were used primarily forhunting, since war, in the modernsense of the term, was little known inPalaeolithic times, though there mayhave been brief skirmishes over terr¬

itorial hunting rights. Weapons alsovaried from one period and one placeto another. The Mousterians had flint

points, spear or Javelin heads, wood

en spears, a few bone points andprobably clubs. Upper Palaeolithicweapons were more developed

various kinds of flint projectile points,such as the magnificent Solutrean"laurel leaf" and shouldered points;also a great quantity and variety ofbone points, and harpoons during thelast, or Magdalenian period.

While Mousterian projectiles werethrown by hand, the Upper Palaeo¬lithic age saw the development of thespear thrower, which is still used byEskimos and Australian aborigines togive greater range and penetration to

spears. It Is just possible that by theUpper Magdalenian age bows wereused, but so far there is no positiveproof of this.

Hunting is as old as man, and it ishighly probable that it was a factorin his evolution, setting a premiumnot only on strength and speed butalso on intelligence. By the time ofHomo sapiens, whether Neanderthalman or modern man, it had existed for

more than two million years; andAcheulean man, more than 100,000years ago and perhaps even 500,000years ago, was already a big game-hunter or "giant-killer".

There were various means of hunt¬

ing, with spears thrown by hand andlater with spear throwers or bows, dif¬ferent types of snares, the use of fireto make animals stampede and leap offa cliff, tracking with several hunterstaking over from each other until the

prey was exhausted. This is probablyhow reindeer, bison and horses werehunted.

Snares probably varied with the sizeof the game : large herbivorous ani¬mals were probably caught in pits dugin the ground and covered with bran¬

ches and leaves. Suspended trapswere laid for carnivores, devised sothat when the animal tried to take thebait he would bring down a roofweighted with heavy stones, or bepinned to the ground by a spear;snares with springs were probably usedfor smaller animals such as hares.

Fishing varied in importance accor¬ding to the period; fish-bones areonly rarely to be found in Mouster¬ian deposits, though this may be dueto the fact that little effort has beenmade to look for them. The Mouster¬

ians probably fished chiefly withspears or by hand, as we know of nospecial fishing equipment.

In Upper Palaeolithic sites, however,vertebrae and other fish bones arefound fairly frequently. There are

small bone artifacts, pointed at bothends, which may have been straighthooks of the kind primitive tribes usetoday, harpoons (for both fishing andhunting), forked objects which mayhave been pronged harpoons, allchiefly in the Magdalenian age, duringwhich fishing probably played an im¬portant part.

It is also probable that nets werealready In existence. Some pebble-flagged floors are supposed to havebeen surfaces for drying fish. Thecatch seems to have been chiefly sal¬mon and trout, but remains of eels,

perch and pike are also found.

Little is known of plant resources,but fossil pollen analysis shows thatthe hazel tree must have flourished in

Europe at some periods. Some acornsare edible. Wild strawberries, rasp¬berries, sloes, blueberries and black¬

berries also existed and it is veryprobable that water-caltrops weregathered. The bulbs or tubers ofseveral plants of the period, partic¬ularly the lily family, were edible, asalso were wild carrots and sorrel.

Gathering was part of the work doneby women and children. In Africaand south-east Asia plant resourcesmust have been even more varied.

HE use of fire has been

known to man since Homo erectus, at

least in Asia and Europe, for in Africathe indications are so far of a later

date. This does not mean however

that Homo erectus knew how to lightit. He may simply have kept it alightafter taking it from a fire due to naturalcauses such as bush fires producedby lightning, marsh fires, etc. But Inthe Mousterian culture and still more

in the Upper Palaeolithic age, there Isno doubt that man knew how to lightfire.

There are two main methods, byrubbing and by striking. A pointedwooden stick may be rubbed to andfro in a groove hollowed out in softwood, or rapidly rotated by hand orwith a bow. Striking is not, as isoften thought, the striking of one flintagainst another, as the resultingsparks are simply cold light; a flint isstruck against a lump of iron pyrites.In some deposits fragments of iron py¬rites have been found which show tra¬

ces of having been struck; sometimesthey are so worn that they must havebeen used regularly as lighters.

It is difficult to estimate the densityof the population, which must have

been thinly scattered, with occasionallarge concentrations of several hun¬dred people living in neighbouringsites.

The expectation of life was not long,though recent research tends to leng¬then the estimates. It was probablyrare to live beyond fifty. There musthave been a high rate of infant mor¬tality and deaths in childbirth.

The first undeniable burials appearwith the Mousterian culture. In Cor-

rèze, at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, a manwas found lying In a trench with hisknees drawn up and his head pro¬tected by large animal bones. A bisonleg had been placed by his head, andbeside him in a small pit were a bisonhorn and frontal bone, as provision fora journey or a funeral offering. Ina Mousterian deposit at Shanldar InIraq, pollen analysis indicates that aman was buried on a bed of flowers.

In the Upper Palaeolithic age funeralrites were more complex. The deadwere often buried with fine objects inflint and bone and elaborate necklaces

of pierced shells, and were powderedwith red ochre. Sometimes largestones were placed on their hands and

feet, perhaps to prevent them comingback to haunt the living.

There are many children's burialplaces, and the Soviet prehistorianOkladnikov attributes this to the factthat Palaeolithic man was more inter¬

ested in the fate of dead children than

that of dead adults. It is also worth

noting the large number of women'sburial places, often as richly ornamen¬ted as those of men, which seems toindicate that discrimination between

the sexes was unknown among Palaeo¬lithic hunters.

Art probably appeared earlier thanone imagines. Many Mousterian sitesyield mineral paint such as black man¬ganese dioxide and yellow and redochre. But we know of no engravings,sculptures or paintings depicting ani¬mals before the Upper Palaeolithic age.The Mousterians probably used min¬eral pigments for painting on perish¬able materials, and perhaps their ownskins, like Australian aborigines.

In the Upper Palaeolithic age, how¬ever, art developed considerably, parti¬cularly in the Magdalenian culture, pro¬ducing splendid achievements in en¬graving, sculpture and painting compa¬rable to those of classical antiquity.It is mainly animals that are portrayed,but in some caves such as those at La

Marche (Vienne, France) we have alarge number of human figures, fre¬quently caricatures, as if the exact

portrayal of the human figure had beentaboo.

As regards magic and religion, var¬ious Interpretations have been givento prehistoric art. When it was firstdiscovered, it was argued that suchart was an expression of a highly dev¬eloped aesthetic sense; subsequentlythe theory was long entertained thatprehistoric art was used to cast spells,

either for successful hunting or toreplenish the stock of game.

Recently, Professor Lerol-Gourhan'sschool has interpreted it as the ex¬pression of the dualism between maleand female, some animals represen¬ting the male principle, others the fe¬male. There is certainly no straight¬forward answer; an explanation whichmay be valid for the Aurignacianperiod (30,000 BC) is not necessarilyso for the Magdalenian (15,000 to9,000 BC).

M OR a long time it wasbelieved that paintings were to befound only on the walls of deep caveswhich may have been sanctuaries, butit now appears that most rock dwel¬

lings were decorated. The great bulkof decorated caves are in western

Europe, but one has been found inthe Urals.

Much has been conjectured aboutthe religion of the Stone Age, butnothing is known for certain. Funeralrites seem to indicate a belief in ano¬

ther world. The theory of bear-wor¬ship by the Mousterians has beenstrongly contested, but recent investi¬gations give it a new lease of life.

As regards social organization, weknow very little, since in most caseswe cannot tell the size of human

groups during this period. We stilldo not know whether a given numberof tools found In a particular layerrepresents 10 men over 100 years, or100 men over 10 years, though recentstudies are beginning to throw a littlelight. Similarities between tool kitsand works of art suggest contactsbetween various human groups overfairly large distances.

In conclusion, much remains to be

learned about daily life in the StoneAge, but what we do know suggeststhat while it was certainly a hard life,it was not on the whole a wretched

one. Where game was plentiful, manmust have had spare time for sculpture

or story-telling. Unfortunately, while n-fcertain works of art have come down /lto us through the ages, the entire oraltradition of stories, legends and songshas disappeared for ever.

Stone age toolmaker 1972

Drawing © Pierre Laurent

22

Intrigued since boyhood with stone ageflints, Professor François Bordes of theUniversity of Bordeaux mastered the tool-making techniques of our ancestors and

Is now considered the world's leadingauthority on palaeolithic tools. He canproduce any palaeolithic Implement withina few minutes. Above, with a few judi¬cious blows with a small stone used as

a hammer, Prof. Bordes produces a roughbut serviceable cutting edge on a lumpof quartzite. Such rough and ready toolshave been found In Africa, Asia and theMiddle East and were early man's basicImplement and weapon for over a millionyears. Below, Prof. Bordes demonstrates

how, using only an antler hammer, astone age hunter could transform a flakeof flint Into a laurel leaf point for useas a dagger or spear head. Left, an

artist's impression of a Magdalenian 'tool-maker at work outside his tent.

Beside this prehistoric oil lamp lie a pendant (with hole) two flint burins or graving tools,a scraper and (bottom left of photo) a harpoon, all products of the Magdalenian culture(15,000 to 9,000 B.C.).

Photo © Celebonovie, Geneva

23

f\

Our

African

ancestors24

by Louis S. B. Leakey

HERE have been so manydiscoveries concerning the evidenceof man's origin during the past fewyears that nearly every textbookavailable today on this subject is outof date. The facts that will be givenbriefly in this paper have all beenpublished in such scientific journalsas Nature, or have been presentedbefore international meetings anddiscussed by our colleagues. Only alimited part of the evidence is yetavailable In book form.

LOUIS S.B. LEAKEY, of Great Britain, Is worldfamous for his discoveries of fossil remains

in East Africa. He began his first archaeolo¬gical research there in 1926, when he was23, and has devoted his life to this workever since. His most exciting finds havebeen made In Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Heis now honorary director of the NationalMuseum Centre for Prehistory and Palaeon¬tology in Nairobi (Kenya) and honorary pro¬fessor of anatomy at the University Collegeof Nairobi. He has published many booksand studies on his excavation and research

into man's past In Africa (see bibliographyinside back cover). Dr Leakey took part InUnesco's 1969 International symposium on theorigins of Homo sapiens, In Paris.

Left, the famous fossil skull of Zinjanthropus found by Dr. and Mrs Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, in 1 959,and described at the time as the earliest ancestor of man ever found, dating back 1.750,000 years. The skull

of this australopithecine is here compared with the skull of a modern man (centre) and a gorilla (right). Therecent discovery at Lake Rudolf, Kenya, of the remains of an australopithecine who lived more than half amillion years before Zinjanthropus, at the same time as a Homo-Mke creature, has completely upset earliertheories, writes Dr. Leakey. "Most textbooks", he says, "still place the genus Australopithecus (includingZinjanthropus) in the direct line of ancestry of the genus Homo, and therefore of Homo sapiens. This viewcan no longer be scientifically maintained".

East Africa today figures veryprominently indeed in the story of theevolution of the direct ancestors of

man himself, as well as of his nearestcousins the great apes and althoughthis article will mainly be concernedwith the end part of the story, fromabout 3 million years ago onwards,it must begin by discussing brieflythe discoveries of the Miocene

period, which began about 20 to 25million years ago.

In spite of the fact that Darwin,more than 100 years ago, ventured topredict that one day it would be foundthat man had originated in Africa, fewpeople believed him and it was onlyIn 1924 that the first indications were

obtained that, in fact, Africa had veryearly fossil primates.

The story begins with a discoverymade by Doctor, H.L. Gordon, whowas living at Koru, in Kenya, andengaged partly in farming and In alimited medical practice. Because ofhis early training and interest Inzoology he began to notice thatfollowing the ploughing of the landof his farm and on subsequent

washing of the ploughed soil by rain,fragments of fossil bones and teethwere visible and he began to collectthese and submitted them to Mr. E. J.

Wayland, the Director of the Geo¬logical Survey in Uganda, and to mein 1926 in Nairobi. We both realized

that Dr. Gordon had made a veryimportant discovery and thus, throughthe accident of having a doctor aswell as a farmer at a critical place,began the long series of discoveries.

Since those early days, East Africahas yielded a vast collection of fossilsof Lower and Upper Miocene age,among which are more than 500 fossilsrepresenting the higher apes and alsoexamples of Proto-man. A similarlyimportant early discovery was madein the same year, 1924, at Taung inSouth Africa when a student broughta fossil specimen to his professor ofanatomy at the Medical School inJohannesburg. This proved to be thefirst discovery of a "near-man" oraustralopithecine. Thus, 1924 was animportant year for the African con¬tinent. As will be seen in this article,discoveries followed thick and fast.

During the early Miocene periodEast Africa was inhabited by a numberof higher primate forms, among whichwere true ape-like creatures such asProconsul africanus at one time

regarded as In the direct line ofancestry of man and also ancestralforms of the gorilla, chimpanzee andgibbon as well, possibly, as anancestral orang-utang.

Living side by side with theseextinct apes in East Africa, at thatremote period, was Kenyapithecusafricanus who is regarded by me, andby many of my colleagues, as in thedirect line of ancestry of man andthe "near-men". This view is not

universally accepted, but the evidenceis very strong. In any event, Kenya¬pithecus africanus Is much moresimilar to a possible ancestor of manthan the other primates which werecontemporary and listed above.

By the Upper Miocene period around12 million years ago, the evidencefrom East Africa Is much more definite.

At Fort Teman, an Upper Miocene sitein Kenya, we have found fossils ofa proto-man named Kenyapithecus

CONTINUED PAGE 27

25

Uï

Photo Hugo Van Lawlck © National Geographic Society. Washington D C.

Olduvai gorge: peephole into prehistory

Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, above,contains one of the world's

richest hoards of fossils and

has been the scene of momen¬

tous discoveries by Dr. Louis

Leakey and his wife Mary.

Above right, Dr. Leakey holdsthe broken molar of a Dinothe-

rium, an extinct, tusked mammal.

On his hat he cradles a tooth

from an extinct elephant. Left,

scientists look on as Leakey

points out the layer in which

"Zinjanthropus" was found. The

first clues to the existence of

"Zinjanthropus" were his huge

teeth and fossilized palate, right.

OUR AFRICAN ANCESTORS (Continued)

wickeri, whose remains are so similar,morphologically, to Ramapithecus ofIndia, but a little older in time, thatsome authorities consider the twospecies to be identical.

That question can only be settledwhen more specimens are found. Inthe meantime, what is certain is thatin the Kenyapithecus wickeri speci¬mens we have a primate with alarge number of hominid charactersand one which is universally acceptedas a hominid or man-like creature,not a pongid or member of the apestock.

Not only does Kenyapithecus wickerihave physical characters such as smallcanine teeth, shovel-shaped incisors,rounded mandibular arcade and ashort face, which are all hominidcharacters, but he was also usingstones to break open antelope skullsand limb bones, in order to obtainthe brains and marrow. The evidencefor this statement lies

skulls with depressedone stone exhibitinghaving been used toIn other words, an Upper Mioceneancestor in Kenya, around 12 millionyears ago, was already extending hisfood beyond mere plant products toinclude animal proteins.

It was probably this widening of hisfood resources that enabled thedescendants of Kenyapithecus wickerito survive, when Proconsul and manyof the other primates, at this time,became extinct. Although it is notpossible to say that Kenyapithecuswickeri must be the ancestor of Homo

sapiens It would certainly seem likelythat he represents the stock fromwhich all man, and man-like specieseventually emerged.

in bones and

fractures and

evidence of

batter bones.

IJN 1931, during my ThirdEast African Archaeological Expedi¬tion, we recovered a fragmentarymandible In a highly fossilized condi¬tion- at Kanam West on the shores ofthe Kavirondo Gulf of Lake Victoria,Kenya. The specimen was highlymineralized and derived from depositsof Lower Pleistocene age, as determin¬ed by the fauna. It had been badlydamaged before being embedded inthe deposits in which it was found,and the lower margin was missing. Idescribed it as Homo kanamensis andfurther indicated that it had many simi¬larities to Homo sapiens. With veryfew exceptions, my colleagues refusedto accept the evidence that thisspecimen was of Lower Pleistocene

age, but I never retracted from mystand, because I knew the evidencewas sound.

It was also during the Third EastAfrican Archaeological Expedition in1931 that I and my colleaguesdiscovered that the famous OlduvaiGorge was very rich in early StoneAge cultural remains.

The original discovery of OlduvaiGorge itself was entirely accidental

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

OUR AFRICAN ANCESTORS (Continued)

'I almost trod on a half exposed fossil skull'

and dates back to 1911, when a Germanbutterfly collector, Dr. Kattwinkel, waschasing a butterfly across the easterncorner of the Serengeti Plains. Hewas so intent on making his catchthat he nearly fell to his death overthe edge of the Gorge. Having losthis butterfly and escaped with his life,he climbed down the sides of the

cliff and found some magnificent fossilbones of a three-toed horse, which hetook back to his colleagues in Berlin.

In 1913 a German expedition wassent out to examine the place wherethese few fossil bones had been foundand discovered a wealth of extinct

animal remains. Thus, again, anaccident led to the discovery of whatis now, probably, the most importantsite of fossil human remains anywherein the world.

Even though I and my colleaguesstudied Olduvai Gorge from 1931onwards and obtained wonderful

collections of artifacts and fossilanimals, we did not find the firstsignificant fossil human skull until1959. This was the discovery of Aus¬tralopithecus (Zinjanthropus) boisei.

URING the past two years"my son, Richard Leakey, has beenconducting intensive palaeontologicaland archaeological research at thenorth east end of Lake Rudolf and he

has found clear evidence of the genusHomo represented by a number ofspecimens. These are completelycontemporary with the fossil fauna,similar, in most respects, to that fromKanam West and undoubtedly ofLower Pleistocene age. AlthoughRichard Leakey's new Homo findshave not yet been given scientificnames, their similarity to the originalKanam mandible is most striking, butRichard's specimens are much morecomplete.

An interesting fact, in connexionwith the discoveries at East Rudolf, isthat in the same series of depositsthere also occur magnificently pre¬served remains of a robust austra-

Photo © National Geographic Society, Washington D.C.

lopithecine, who was contemporarywith Homo, and which are more thanhalf a million years older than Aus¬tralopithecus (Zinjanthropus) boisei,from Olduvai. There is, therefore,clear evidence from Kenya of aLower Pleistocene form of the genusHomo, which is completely contem¬porary with the australopitheclnes InLower Pleistocene times.

These facts inevitably lead us toa brief discussion on the australo-

pithecines as a whole. Most of theexisting textbooks still place thegenus Australopithecus (includingZinjanthropus and Paranthropus andother comparable forms) in the directline of ancestry of the genus Homo,and therefore of Homo sapiens. Thisview can no longer be scientificallymaintained.

Undoubtedly, of course, the australo¬pitheclnes and Homo must have acommon ancestor, somewhere in thescale between the Upper Mioceneand the Lower Pleistocene, but sucha common ancestor has not yet beenfound. The fact, however, that a veryrobust australopithecine with a numberof over-specialized characters existedin the Lower Pleistocene some 2i to

3 million years ago, and was con¬temporary with Homo, completelydestroys the view that, Australo¬pithecus, as such, is our directancestor. When a common stock

from which these two types of hominidare derived is eventually discovered,it will probably have some charactersof both, but clearly be distinguishablefrom either.

It is interesting to note, here, thatin the deposits at East Rudolf ofLower Pleistocene age which havenow yielded numerous specimens ofHomo, there are stone artifacts whichare very closely similar to the threefound in situ at Kanam West withthe Kanam mandible. These werepublished in my book "The StoneAge Races of Kenya". The preliminarynotes which have been publishedconcerning the East Rudolf artifactsshow clearly that the genus Homo wasmaking several different types of

f£avTanzanian stamp Issuedin 1965 In honour of thefirst famous find at Ol¬

duvai Gorge.

TANZANIA

stone tools, during the Lower Pleis¬tocene In that area.

At Olduvai Gorge a little less thantwo million years ago, we have foundfurther very significant evidencerelative to the origin of the genusHomo and, therefore, of Homo sapiens.In Bed I at Olduvai in 1959 we

discovered a very well preservedskull of an australopithecine whichwe described as Zinjanthropus boisei.At the time of the discovery noother hominid remains were known

from Olduvai Bed I, while we hadmuch evidence of the Stone Ageculture known as Oldowan in these

deposits.

Although, therefore, it was acceptedthat Zinjanthropus was an australo¬pithecine, in its physical morphology,it seemed posible that it might qualifyas a "man", in view of the currentdefinition of "man" at that time"Man the Tool-Maker". A few months

later the first fragmentary fossils ofwhat is now called Homo habilis were

found in deposits of the same age asZinjanthropus and also in associa¬tion with the Oldowan culture. Since

then, many further specimens of thissecond type of hominid have beenfound at Olduvai and published inNature and elsewhere, as it is clearthat they represent the genus Homo,living during the Lower Pleistocene.

A full description is in preparationat the present time, in monograph,and there is no doubt whatsoever

that the morphology of Homo habilisis much more similar (at least inrespect of the cranial vault) to Homosapiens than are the fossil remainsof Homo erectus, the extinct hominidspecies first found in Java and Chinaand later in Africa in Middle Pleis¬

tocene deposits.

HERE seems very littledoubt that Homo habilis lies in the

direct line leading to Homo sapiens.In all probability the branch whichended up as Homo erectus divergedfrom Homo habilis at least as far back

as the Lower Pleistocene, in view ofthe fact of his presence, in the FarEast, as a fully distinct and over-spe¬cialized species in the Middle Pleis¬tocene.

Another accidental discovery ofthe greatest importance took placein 1961 the find of remains of

the same type of man as in Chinaand Java, but twice as old in EastAfrica as in the Far East. This time

the accident was due to an error on

the part of one of my staff. Thegeologist working with me returned tocamp one day with a draft plane tablemap of a certain part of the Gorge.I looked at it and said, "But you haveleft out one long narrow side gully."He replied, "I have not", and I said,

>*

o

ci

With his smooth,, sloping brow and canine teeth smaller than those of most apes,though larger than man's, "Proconsul Africanus" was once thought of as a possiblecommon ancestor of apes and hominids.

"I am very sorry, but you have;come over with me tomorrow morningand I will show you."

When we got to the long and rathergrass and bush filled gully, and he hadhad to admit that he was in error, Ilooked back towards our camp siteand suddenly on the far side of theGorge I saw a very small area ofexposed fossil beds. These were onthe north side of the tongue of landwhich separates the main and sidegorges.

Although I had explored Olduvaion foot since 1931 I knew, at once,that I had never set foot In that tinyexposure. But for the error on thepart of my student which had takenme back to the point from which I sawit, I might still never have seen it.It was only visible from that onepoint of view. As soon as we got backto camp, I went off again to locatethis hidden patch of exposures, andas I walked on to it I almost trod on

a half exposed fossil human skull.That was the first Homo erectus skullfrom Olduvai.

This brings us, inevitably, to adiscussion of the further textbookview that Homo erectus is a direct

ancestor of Homo sapiens. This view,too, can no longer be taken seriouslyfor the following reasons:

The shape of the cranial vault ofall specimens of Homo erectus isquite dissimilar to the cranial vaultof Homo sapiens while, as alreadystated above, the shape of the vaultof Homo habilis, which is much olderin time, is very similar.

Homo erectus exhibits a largenumber of highly specialized charac¬ters which are present in the Africanand Far Eastern variants while Homo

habilis has many more Homo sapiensgeneralized features.

The pelvic bone of Homo erectusfound in Olduvai Gorge and publishedrecently, and the femur shaft associat¬ed with it, are clearly of a quitedifferent type from the correspondingbones of Homo sapiens and it beginsto look doubtful whether the Trinil

femur truly belongs to Homo erectus.

When we go on, therefore, todiscuss the emergence of Homosapiens, in the light of the evidenceavailable in 1972, it becomes entirelyclear that we have to revise our total

picture of how our species came intobeing.

HERE can be no doubt

now, at all, that Homo sapiens waspresent in the Middle Pleistocenetimes in both Europe and Africa; afact which was accepted at the Unes¬co sponsored Conference on the originof Homo sapiens, in Paris, in 1969,when specimens such as the skullsfrom Kanjera, Swanscombe and thenew Kibish specimens from southernEthiopia were unanimously acceptedas representing Homo sapiens in aprimitive form, but . quite distinctlysapiens. In fact this species waspresent during the Middle Pleistocenetimes in areas as far apart as Swans¬combe in England and Kanjera in

Kenya. It is obvious, therefore, thatan earlier form of Homo sapiens mustoccur somewhere In older deposits.

When the fragmentary Kanjeraskulls were found deriving from MiddlePleistocene deposits and in associa¬tion with hand axes in 1932, theywere rejected, much as the earlierKanam mandible was rejected, andwere placed in what was called a"Suspense Accouht". When theSwanscombe skull, in its turn, wasdescribed in 1936 as Homo sapiens,it was rejected because It seemed tooold for that species. It was onlywhen the southern Ethiopian skullsfrom Kibish were discovered in 1967

that a new concept of the antiquityof Homo sapiens began to crystallize,and become accepted.

To conclude this discussion we

may, perhaps, be permitted to try anddistinguish between Homo sapienssapiens (what Is known today aspsycho-social man) and Homo sapiensfaber early tool making members ofour species who had not yet achievedfull psycho-social status.

I believe that the beginning ofpsycho-social man probably coincideswith the dawn of art, religion, magicbeliefs and speech in terms of abstractideas as distinct from mere words

describing material objects. By thistime too man had begun, perhaps,to be a community dweller as shownby the vast accumulations of hisartifacts in the caves of the Dordogneand elsewhere during the' UpperPleistocene times.

29

Cave wall artcomes to man

byAndré Leroi-Gourhan

30

ANDRE LEROI-GOURHAN is one of the out¬

standing world authorities on prehistoric art.He is professor of prehistory at the Collègede France and director of the Institute of

Ethnology in Paris. He has directed manyarchaeological excavations in Europe and theFar East. He took part In Unesco's 1969international symposium on the origin ofHomo sapiens, in Paris (see bibliographyinside back cover).

HE contemporary arts ofAfrica and Oceania are often mis¬

takenly labelled "primitive" a seriouserror since these arts have had justas long an evolution as western art.Traces of this evolution have all too

often vanished, yet those that surviveprove that styles varied over thecenturies and that, although their"language of forms" differs from thathanded down to us from Ancient

Greece, the so-called "primitive" arts

are in no sense rudimentary.

The same cannot be said for the

oldest prehistoric art whose firstexpressions canx be perceived at thedawn of modern man. This is the true

primitive art.

As other articles in this issue make

clear, the concept of humanity changesaccording to whether we consider manwithin the span of history or within thecontext of the modern age.

In the modern context we find a

single global concept of man; Homosapiens, symbolizing the human race.But within the span of history, thingsare quite different. For one or two

million years, perhaps even longer,thousands of generations of bipedssucceeded one another, and Homo

sapiens emerged perhaps less thanfifty thousand years ago.

Along this interminable road ofearly human development we en¬counter relatively few works of art.

The cave of Lascaux in S.W. Franceboasts some of the finest prehistoricart of the Magdalenian period (15,000-9,000 B.C.). Cave artists, who deplet¬ed hundreds of vigorous and lifelikeanimal figures on its walls and ceiling,knew the animals around them intima¬

tely, and displayed an extraordinaryunderstanding of and skill in paintingby contrasting black, brown, red andyellow paints to enhance the realismof their work (see back cover). Horsesin this Lascaux fresco (centre, beneatha leaping cow, and at far left) havebeen called "Chinese" because of

their similarity to horses seen in Chi¬nese art 15,000 years later.

At best, one can imagine the pre¬decessors of modern men, while their

intellect gradually evolved, indulgingan occasional aesthetic impulse byusing their voices, beating out rhythmsand making body movements, the pre¬cursors of song, music and dance.

As one approaches the types ofmen nearer our own Neanderthal

man for Instance one can add to

these embryonic forms of artisticcreation the first signs of engraving,painting and sculpture.

No structured and decipherable workof art from these very distant timeshas yet been discovered, but we doknow that between 40,000 and 100,000

years ago Neanderthal men handlednatural red ochre and may even havescratched lines on bone fragmentswith the point of a flint.

Unfortunately, there Is little to helpthe prehistorian to understand howthe arts were born: only a few tracesof pigment to attest that men werealready interested in colour. Some¬times, too, the odd-shaped stones andfossilized shells found among the usedflint tools and remains of game inearly settlements show us that ournearest forefathers were intrigued bythe spontaneous forms of nature.This attraction for "natural curiosities"

is deeply anchored in the aestheticbehaviour of man and has survived

all through history, right up to our owntimes.

That Neanderthal men, or the type

of humanity just preceding our own,had aesthetic needs, as well as the

means of satisfying them, is shownby the already advanced state of theirtechnical skills. The shaping of stonetools creates forms which quicklyacquire regular outlines (ovals, bladeswith nearly parallel sides, triangles,and so on). The first production ofsuch artificial forms was dictated bythe technique used to prepare the

Photo 0 Jean Vertut. Paris

flint blocks from which the efficient

tool was to emerge.

Although It has been shown thatchance fragments of split flint can beused as tools, we perceive, during thefirst million years of human prehistory,a search in progress for processeswhich would enable artifacts to be

standardized. We find, too, a gradualevolution of styles which enable us toidentify objects from different periods.

The search for efficient tools and

the need for an economical use of

whatever raw materials came to hand

are the obvious explanation for thisevolution in tool-making. Yet thetruly significant fact is that thisincreasing technical progress is in¬separable from the growing elaborationof aesthetic forms.

However, until about 40,000 B.C.

one cannot really speak of true worksof art works in which the hands of

men created not merely an object butalso a symbol.

It is difficult to draw clear lines of

demarcation between the successive

stages of man's evolution since, in atheoretical sense, they are not thoseof pre-men, proto-men and finally truemen. From the very beginning weare dealing with men who gradually

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

CAVE WALL ART (Continued)

became more and more human, rightdown to modern times. The same is

true for art which did not suddenlyappear fully formed, but evolvedgradually through the ages. Neander¬thal man's interest in the curiosities of

nature or in pigments, therefore mark¬ed a decisive phase in a continuousprocess which reached its full develop¬ment later.

This development, reflected in thenature of modern men, is in allprobability linked with the emergenceof language, or at any rate, thecapacity to formulate abstractions.The hand, like the vocal organs, faith¬fully expresses thought. And althoughit is true that until the appearance ofwriting we have no direct witness toverbal expression (which stems fromthe same cerebral centres as manual

expression), nothing prevents us from

supposing that language and technicalskill were interdependent all throughhuman evolution.

But if from the beginning the handgave form to thought through thecraftsman's gestures and left a perma¬nent "memory-print" of the un¬conscious search for forms, no trace

of any consciously created shapeswith a symbolic rather than practicalfunction has been found among theremains of the men who lived between

500,000 and 1 million years ago.

What the' hand did not translate is

not likely to have existed in thelanguage; and it seems that anychange had to wait until the longprocess of cerebral and culturaldevelopment reached a certain thresh¬old. Homo sapiens the presenthuman species crossed that thresh¬

old some forty thousand years ago.

Strikingly enough, ornaments (pierc¬ed teeth and pendants) appeared atthe same time as the first attempts atfigurative art. It is as though theemerging modes of expression trans¬lated at the same time the symbolsof social behaviour (ornaments) andthe symbols of abstract expressionwhich confirms the link between

artistic and verbal expression. Theaesthetic impulse is always the carrierof social yearnings, in the fullestsense. It does not exist for its own

sake because it is a means of express¬ing or giving form to feelings ofpower, love or religious aspiration.

So far as one can judge, the orna¬mental or figurative prehistoric artsobeyed the same rules as later arts.The exact date of their emergence isdifficult to fix, partly because we arefar from knowing the prehistory of all

Two tiny statuettes carved by artists of the Aurlgnacianperiod (30,000-25,000 B.C.). The one above measuringonly 37 mm. (1 1/2 In.) was discovered at Lake Trasimeno(central Italy). Right, the famous 'Venus of Willendorf"(Austria) is 110 mm. (4 In.) high.

Prehistoric artists rarely portrayed the human face. Inside frontcover depicts one. Two others are shown here. Above, humanhead carved on a limestone pebble no bigger than a hen's egg.Believed to date from about 20,000 B.C. it was unearthed atAq Kuptuk in northern Afghanistan. Right, a head carved in Ivory47 mm. (2 In.) found at Dolni Vestonice (Czecholovakia).

the regions of the world, but aboveall because we are dealing with anevolutionary per¡od¡ not a particularmoment in time. Behind innovation

there is always an inventor; butbehind the inventor looms a whole

social and historical background.And when, as In the present case, thefacts cover many small stages spreadout over thousands of years, it wouldbe an oversimplification to speak ofthe "invention" of painting or sculp¬ture.

Our knowledge covers the finalperiod of European Neanderthal manand the end of the last glacial period

perhaps from 50,000 B.C. and

certainly up 9,000 B.C. The begin¬nings were extremely slow; and morethan half the period was gone beforethe creation of the great paintings orlow-reliefs of the western Europeancaves.

During the second half of theperiod, however, there was an extra¬ordinary abundance of decoratedcaves in Spain, France, Italy and eventhe Urals, and a profusion of sculp¬ture and engraving all the way fromthe Atlantic to Lake Baikal in Siberia.

Works from this long initial periodof artistic evolution will certainly bediscovered in other parts of the world.But up to now the thousands of paint¬ings and engravings discovered inAfrica or southern Asia, for instance,

belong to more recent periods. Thisdoes not, of course, make them anyless valuable or significant.

A very important point should benoted concerning prehistoric art: itstechnical means reached their fullest

development from the very beginning.This is something that radically dis¬tinguishes artistic creation fromtechnical invention. Hunting, fishing,

weaving, clothing and home-makingskills slowly evolved up to the present.One cannot imagine prehistoric maninventing the aeroplane on the basisof the scientific knowledge offeredhim by his own society. But 'withcoloured earths and with flint tools

whose cutting power is superior tomost metal ones, the artist was

immediately in possession of all hismeans of expression.

Time brought new processes likemosaics or oil painting, new colourslike greens or blues, as well as variousnuances in the execution; but from

the very first the artist could give hiswhole measure In forms, in contrasts

of colour and in relief . . . The positionis therefore very different for art thanfor technology.

In technology, the factor of theprehistoric craftsman's creative ima-

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

CAVE WALL ART (Continued)

HORSE'S HEAD IN MINIATURE

Carved with superlative skill and minute precision by an artist of theMagdalenian period on a tiny piece of reindeer antler, this horse'shead measures only 45 mm (2 In.) from ear to muzzle. It was foundin a cave at Mas d'Azil (south-west France).

Photo © S. Celebonovlc, Geneva

gination can be disregarded when oneconsiders the material equipment at

his disposal. His level of achievementcorresponds to the stage at which hissociety has arrived, according to itsperiod and geographical situation.

For art, the dependence on thetechnical and social environment is of

another order. Crude works and

those which reach full mastery ofexpression can be found in the samesociety, simultaneously or succes¬sively.

Where engraving and sculpture areconcerned, the problem of tools doesnot arise. Flint is perfectly adequatewhether for cutting or carving bone,lumps of soft stone or the walls. ofcaves and rock overhangs. And itis even easier'to trace shapes with afinger on wet clay or to model themin the same material. So such works

are found from the beginning. Model¬ling and sculpture in low-relief do notappear until relatively late, however,

probably not before 15,000 B.C. Butthe search for "three dimensional"

effects is a dominant trait in the

evolution of prehistoric art.

In the case of "hollowed out" works

of art, one point deserves specialmention. For practical reasons, low-relief is only found in hollows lit bydaylight. The designs must havetaken many weeks to execute; and indeep caves this would have requiredsome form of lighting, as well asprolonged stays underground.

But In some caves (for instance atFont de Gaume in the Dordogne), onecomes across an expeditive process

for rendering relief which reveals theuse of an astonishing technical knack.After the figure has been traced witha line a few millimetres deep, the Innerborder has been rounded off, and with

side lighting this gives a strikingillusion of relief.

LPART from wall figures,prehistoric artists have left numerousengravings on stone tablets or bonesand antlers. Certain objects like thetips of weapons are decorated withsimple geometrical patterns; and spearthrowers often bear highly elaboratedanimal figures.

Small sculptures in the round in theform of human and animal figures werealso made. In certain regions, such asCzechoslovakia or the U.S.S.R., wherecave art is unknown, hundreds ofstatuettes carved in soft stone or

modelled in clay have been found,while female figures, generally . with

CONTINUED PAGE 39

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CAVE WALL CAVALCADE. Cavalcades of animals painted ¡n Palaeolithic times on cave walls and ceilingsvividly illustrate how hunting dominated the life and imagination of prehistoric man. The meticulous portrayalof horses and remdeer, chamois and bison, lions, bears, mammoths and other animals shows that they were thework of experienced artists. This shaggy-haired mammoth figures on a painted panel of beasts in the Pech-Merle cave in the Lot Department of south-west France. The painted horse (centre spread, overleaf) from acave at Niaux (S.W. France) Is outstanding for its lifelike representation. Note how the artist has imitatedflow of the mane by skilful use of sloping lines. Photos © Jean Vertut, Paris

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ART OF

PREHISTORIC

SPAIN

The artists of prehistorydepicted many kinds ofdeer. Left, antlered stag(40 cm. long) on the wallof the famous Las Chime¬

neas cave near Santander

(northern Spain). Below, ared-painted doe from theCovalanas cave in the same

area.

Photos © Jean Vertut, Paris

CAVE WALL ART (Continued trom page 34)

The palette of the Palaeolithic painter

greatly exaggerated forms, are com¬mon from the Atlantic coast of the

Pyrenees to Lake Baikal in Siberia.

The development of painting isequally remarkable. As has beenshown, colours were in use very earlyon. By 35,000 B.C., prehistoric manknew how to employ fire to oxydizenatural ochres and change theirshades; and the whole range ofyellows and purplish reds was knownand used. Black was supplied bynatural manganese or charcoal.

ECHNIQUES for applyingpaint were no less varied. When theochre or manganese was sufficientlyfirm and friable, true crayons werecut, which served to decorate flat

surfaces. Hard colours were groundon a palette of rough stone; and boththese and natural powders were

applied in various ways according tothe nature of the background or theeffect sought after.

Sometimes the pigments werestippled in close dots, dabbed on withthe tip of the finger or printed with asmall stick; sometimes continuous

lines of varying width were drawn inthe same way or even with truebrushes.

Occasionally, a special method wasotherwise have discouraged artisticefforts. The most striking case is themain part of the Lascaux grotto (Dor-dogne, France). The surface of thewhite calcite walls is lumpy, like acauliflower, and ill-suited to the usual

painting techniques.

The Lascaux artists, some 15,000

years ago, solved the problem bystencilling on the powdered colourswith the help of a fur pad, giving adappled effect. As these blurreddabs made it difficult to obtain a clear

outline, the painter masked the outeredge of the figures with a strip ofbark or leather, moving it along as headvanced.

This extremely ingenious processrequired considerable manual dex¬

terity; and it confirms the feeling onehas when one studies the greatartistic achievements of the French

and Spanish caves: the fresco artistsmust have been specialists, at leastpart of whose activity was devoted todecorating underground sanctuaries.

As was mentioned earlier, the most

original aspect of prehistoric cavewall art is perhaps the search for athree-dimensional effect. As well

as low-relief sculptures and carv¬ings with rounded inner edges, twoother techniques were developed.

The first is common to the various

painting and engraving processes. Itconsists in taking advantage of naturalirregularities in the wall by placingthe work in such a way that a bump isused for a flank, the edge of a rockfor a bone or a small knob for paws

with colours or engraved linesstressing the natural volumes andmaking them explicit.

The second solution is to vary thethickness of the line or use shadingor hatchings. This method is usedwith great skill at Altamira near San¬tander, in northern Spain towards11 or 12,000 B.C. and at Niaux (Ariège,France). It puts the frescoes in thedepths of these caves on a level withthe finest works produced by the greatartists of historical times.

Can one indeed justifiably des¬cribe as "primitive", an art which

already has thousands of years ofdevelopment behind it? It is reassuringto remind ourselves that at a time

when technology was rudimentary andhuman life still at a subsistence level,

thousands of years before agriculture,metal-working and writing broughtinto being the civilizations of antiquity,man had found ways of giving fullexpression to his artistic thought andby the same token to his humanity.

Ancient rock carvings have beenfound In many parts of the world.This rock engraving is from LakeOnega, 200 km east of Leningrad,where archaeologists have uncover¬ed numerous traces of Neolithic peo¬ples who lived on the lake's shoresand Islands: tools, and rock-cut ani¬mal figures including many reindeer.

39

The

long journeyof

the primatesby John Napier

40

HE story of man and hisancestors is like a play In which thekey character does not appear untilthe last scene. Yet by the time hefinally makes his. entrance theaudience has already got a very goodIdea, from what has gone before, ofthe sort of person he is going to turnout to be.

To say man is the "key"' actor Inthe drama of primate evolution, ofcourse, is to take a very biased view.There is no doubt that if this article

were being written by a giraffe, forexample, man might find himselfallotted a very minor and probablymost obnoxious part in the evolution¬ary saga of the primates. It is naturalthat man should be self-centred In

his approach to primate evolution butthat does not mean that he is not

JOHN NAPIER Is Director of the Unit ofPrimate Biology at Queen Elizabeth College,University of London. A leading specialistIn the anatomy of non-human primates, hewas formerly director of the Primate BiologyProgram at the Smithsonian Institution, Wash¬ington, D.C. He has written several bookson the origins of man (see bibliographyInside back cover). He is well-known toBritish TV audiences for his contributions topopular science programmes, and has ¡ustcompleted a book on the Abominable Snow¬man, to be published shortly under the title"Blgfoot", by Jonathan Cape, London.

capable of thinking in any other way.Many of my zoological colleagues,

for instance, are principally interestedin analysing the background of thenon-human primates, the lemurs, mon¬keys or apes. But I am an anthro¬pologist which means that man is thecentral theme of my research so It Isnot surprising that I am primarily in¬terested in the appearance of those

structural and functional features bywhich we characterize man today. Thisbeing so we must clarify our ideas anddecide just what we should be look¬ing for in the primate fossil record.

First of all we must examine thenature of our criteria and select those

characters that are unique to modernman and can truly be called his"hallmarks" (*). There are quite anumber of characters that we mightchoose but, bearing in mind that oursource material is limited to fossil

bones and teeth, the range is naturallyrather restricted. The possession ofspeech and language Is the most

* Hallmarks are stamped on gold and silverobjects. Basically they provide a verifi¬cation of the purity of the metal but theyalso supply other Information such as thecountry of origin, the date and place ofassay and often the Identity of the crafts¬man.

outstanding human hallmark of all butunfortunately it leaves no trace inancient bones.

One can make all sorts of in¬

ferences that speech evolved at such-and-such a time but there is no scrapof direct evidence to support such anassertion. The ability to speak lies,first of all, in the shape and mus¬culature of the mouth, tongue, softpalate, pharynx and larynx; andsecondly, in the centres of the cortex,or outer shell, of the brain whichgovern the muscular control of the

various "soft" parts mentioned above.Although many ingenious suggestionshave been put forward none as far as

we know can help us to recognizethe capacity for speech from a studyof bones.

There are numerous cultural

phenomena which we would regardas significant hallmarks but, again, wecannot use them because they leaveno physical evidence behind. Be¬haviour itself does not fossilize but theextra-corporeal accessories of be¬haviour do.

Evidence of a hunting economy canbe determined from the living sites(or living "floors" as they are called)of early man ; in the same way tool-

CONTINUED PAGE 42

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This drawing is taken from the 2nd edition of Charles Darwin's book "The Descent of Man", M4

published in London in 1883 by John Murray. The solemn-faced simian is perhaps bowed down by <f |the weight of his name Semnopithecus rubicundas. Charles Darwin explained the curious hairpattern In terms of sexual selection. "It is Inconceivable", he wrote, "that such patterns can beof use in any ordinary way".

JOURNEY OF THE PRIMATES (Continued)

42

making behaviour can be identified.Much as a modern picnic site canreveal to an intelligent inquirer all heneeds to know about the habits and

social status of the picnickers, so liv¬ing floors of early man with theirhearths, their animal remains, theirwall-paintings, their burials and soon can be read and interpreted byarchaeologists.

Unfortunately the background to manthat we are committed to investigateextends many millions of years furtherback in time when no living floors andno artifacts existed. Apart from theevidence of stone or bone tools as

supplements to our understanding ofhuman dexterity we shall not beleaning very heavily on the evidenceof "fossil behaviour". What, then, areto be our criteria?

When we think about man and

compare him with non-man one of thefirst things that strikes us is that hestands upright and walks on two legs.But this is not nearly a preciseenough definition to exclude the manynon-human primates who are also cap¬able of upright bipedalism. Nor does itexclude, for example, the bears. For amore exact criterion we must draw

upon our knowledge of the bio¬mechanics of human walking.

Human walking is a highly complexaffair. This is not the place to stuffyou with technical details like aStrasbourg goose with rich food, butto ask you to accept the simplifiedbut nonetheless valid conclusion

that modern man shows a uniquemethod of walking which we callstriding. Striding involves the musclesand the joints of the vertebral column,the pelvis, the leg and the foot in acomplicated and precisely integratedseries of manoeuvres. An alternative

term for striding is heel-toe walking.We are now in a position to formulateour first hallmark: Man stands uprightand when walking habitually uses abipedal, striding gait.

The second characteristic thatstrikes us is the dexterity of the humanhand which is infinitely capable,exquisitely delicate but, at the sametime, alarmingly powerful powerfulenough to cleave a brick in half witha karate chop, or to tear a citytelephone directory into two equalparts.

The essential component of thehuman hand Is its opposable thumb,which provides the means for grasp¬ing objects with strength (the powergrip) or with delicacy (the precisiongrip). The opposable thumb is there¬fore an obvious hallmark, but un¬

fortunately it Is not unique to man; allliving Old World monkeys and apespossess opposable thumbs.

'NCE again we must drawupon our knowledge of the functionalanatomy of man's hand to set us onthe right track. Man's precision gripis much more sophisticated than anymonkey's or ape's; when he placeshis forefinger and thumb together ina precision grip he is employing thetwo most acutely sensitive areas Inhis whole body. The sensory inputfrom these small areas provides theneurological basis for the sort of skillthat a watchmaker, a plastic surgeonor an assembler of micro-circuits

possesses.

Sometime 'ago, In order to providea means of quantifying the precisiongrip of primates, I introduced a simpleratio called the opposability index toexpress the relative lengths of theforefinger and thumb. The oppo¬sability index of men is 65. The scorefor a chimpanzee is 43 and for' ababoon, which approaches nearest toman in this respect, it is 57. So nowwe are in a position to formulate thesecond hallmark: man possesses enopposable thumb whose length isapproximately 65 per cent the lengthof his forefinger.

Man's debt

to the tree

To his ancient ancestors who were tree-livingcreatures, man owes his mobility of hand,opposable thumb and the upright postureof at least the upper part of his body. Left,Gibbon apes still swing happily from treeto tree, but, like man, the gorilla (right) isnow basically a ground-living animal, thoughhis lower limbs have not adapted to truebipedalism and he still supports himself withhis knuckles when walking. Through evolu¬tionary changes in the pelvis, man and hisancestors adopted a bipedal, striding gait,better adapted to ground-living. Drawing (farright), the pelvic girdle of Australopithecusas compared with that of a chimpanzee.

The third feature that strikes usabout man is that his brain is largeand rounded; but of course brains donot fossilize and so we can only makedeductions about the brain from thestudy of its container the brain-box.Unfortunately, apart from overall shapeand size, there is no means of deter¬mining the nature of the brain by asimple examination of fossil skulls.

What is more, size itself is a some¬what misleading indicator becauseit is naturally variable within aspecies; for example among mod¬ern human populations the brainvolume ranges from 950-2000 cubiccentimetres. The average volume isabout 1400 cc. Brain size is related

to body size bigger animals havebigger brains and, in some way thatwe don't fully understand, to in¬telligence.

Nevertheless, brain size is avaluable guide to the palaeontologistwho is attempting to follow the trackof man through time. From theearliest pre-human stages to the finalflowering of the human familyexpressed In the species Homo sapiens,a steady trend towards enlargementis seen. Here, then, is the basis ofour third hallmark which can be

expressed thus: man, relative to hisbody size, has a large, rounded brainthat may exceed 1400 cc in volume.

Finally, we notice that manpossesses small, even teeth arrangedin an elegant parabolic form in hisupper and lower jaw. The humanteeth, like those of all living primates,are of four types: incisors, canines,premolars and molars. Together inboth jaws they total 32, a numbercharacteristic of all Old World

monkeys and apes but not New Worldmonkeys or prosimians.

Unlike the apes, man's teeth areall more or less the same vertical

length; the canines which formmassive elongated and projectingteeth in the apes are small, short anddiscrete in man. Human molars bear

low, rounded cusps In contrast to thesharp, prominent cusps of apes andmonkeys. The human third molar inboth jaws is often small and Is fre¬quently absent, whereas in apes thethird molar is often the largest of theseries.

There are many other differencesbut these few should be adequate forthe purpose of defining the fourth hall¬mark as follows: man's teeth are small

and are arranged in the jaws in a pa¬rabolic curve, the third molar being thesmallest of the series and the canines

non-projecting.

wITH these hallmarks in

mind we ought to be able to pick upthe trail of man during our journeythrough the past. The trip will berather like travelling by train betweentwo cities a thousand miles apart.Most railway systems are very com¬plicated affairs with numerous junc¬tions, switching points, branch linesand dead-end terminals, so we haveto constantly be on our guard that wedo not become shunted along long-forgotten tracks that simply finish upat the end of nowhere at a pair ofrusty buffers.

There is a very real danger of thishappening because evolution frequent¬ly involves a form of mimicry as a re¬sult of which similar characters cropup in unrelated or distantly relatedforms. We have already seen forexample that walking on two legs Isnot uniquely the possession of man.This form of mimicry is moreproperly termed parallelism and thetheory behind it is that, given asimilar set of environmental opportu¬nities, animals with a common ances¬

try will tend to evolve in a similar way.

The best example of parallelism inprimate evolution is that the monkeysof the New World and the Old World,which are related through a common

ancestor living 40 million or so yearsago, share so many physical charac¬ters that it is hard for the averageperson to tell them apart even seeingthem side by side in a zoo.

Man has a double ecological heri¬tage. His earliest ancestors were tree-living creatures well adapted to mov¬ing, feeding, mating and sleeping highabove the ground in tropical forests.His later forebears were ground-liversspending their lives among tropicalwoodlands and grasslands In com¬petition with the myriads of ground-based mammals including the large,predatory, carnivores.

His two phases are complementary;without an arboreal background hecould never have succeeded on the

ground. He possesses neither thefleetness of the impala nor the killerpower of the leopards, cheetahs andlions; but he has, through his arborealbackground, acquired talents whichwere of infinitely greater value.

He could run on the ground and hecould climb trees; he could evade dan¬gers by subtle manoeuvres undreamedof by the instinct-dominated predatorsand with his emancipated hands hecould use weapons and tools to pro¬tect himself and to obtain food. Hands

were far more efficient than the hooves

of his ungulate competitors. Para¬doxical as it may seem, man's successas a ground-living primate was entire¬ly due to his arboreal heritage.

The earliest ancestors of the pri¬mates were among the first mammalsto make their appearance. At thisstage, some 70 million years ago, pri¬mates-to-be were small, long-nosed,ground-living animals rooting amongthe leaves of the forest floor for their

insect food, and distinguishable onlyby obscure characters of the teeth andskull from the other long-nosed insec¬tivorous creatures.

With hindsight, some authorities feelthey can recognize these primates-to-be even though they possessed none

of the arboreal characters by whichwe now recognize the order. Theymay well be right, but to those of usinterested In living primates (includingman) the order, effectively, came intobeing when the primates started tolive in trees.

Plesiadapis ¡s a most unprimate-likeprimate and is totally deficient in arbo¬real adaptations, while Smilodectesand Notharctus which appeared a fewmillion years later were alreadyadvanced tree-climbers.

Arboreal characters can be brieflysummarized as follows:

Mobility of the hands and feet andparticularly of the thumb and big toewhich are well separated from theother digits and, in some primates,capable of being opposed.

Replacement of sharp claws by flat¬tened nails, associated with the de¬velopment of sensitive pads on the tipsof the digits.

A shortening of the .snout associat¬ed with a reduction in the apparatusand the functions of smell.

Convergence of the eyes towardsthe front of the face associated with

the development of stereoscopicvision.

H A large brain relative to body size.

An upright posture which may beconfined to the upper part of the bodyin some but applies throughout inothers.

The lemur-like Eocene family theAdapidas (including the genera No¬tharctus and Smilodectes) possessesmost of these arboreal adaptations:nails had replaced claws and sens¬ory pads were developing on the fingertips, the eyes were converging andthe snout was shortening, the brainwas relatively large, and the loco¬motion pattern Involved an uprightposture of the upper part of the bodywhile in the lower part the hips andknees were acutely flexed.

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

43

JOURNEY OF THE PRIMATES (Continued)

When the ape line and human line diverged

44

This last feature, alone, merits ourparticular interest because the uprightposture is one of the hallmarks weare committed to trace. Later forms

such as Necrolemur, an early Euro¬pean tarsier-Iike primate, and Hemia-codon, a North American form, show asimilar postural pattern.

The next recognizable stage in thefossil record is seen during the geolo¬gical epoch known as the Oligocène;at present the ancestor-descendantlinkages between the Oligocène andEocene primates have not been prov¬ed. Most of our Information about the

Oligocène primates comes from aregion of Egypt called the Fayum, nowdesert but once covered with dense

tropical forest.

Between 25-35 million years ago theFayum was the home of an extra¬ordinary variety of ape and monkey¬like creatures. Some, like Parapithe-cus, were probably destined to becometrue monkeys; some, like Aeolopithe-cus, to become "half-apes" like thegibbons, and some, like Aegyptopithe-cus, to become true apes like the chim¬panzee and the gorilla.

It has even been suggested verytentatively that one of these creaturescalled Propliopithecus represents theearliest known member of the humanlineage. Both Propliopithecus andAegyptopithecus, of which only teethor jaws are known, show some of thecharacters which anticipate the humancondition. Aegyptopithecus, whilepossessing some human-like dentalcharacters, also has features whichare strongly reminiscent of later apes.

This raises an important point: therelationship of man and apes. Nearlyeveryone would agree that their rela¬tionship in terms of anatomical struc¬ture and physiological and biochemicalfunctions is extremely close. Theprincipal Issue is how close? Whendid the ape line and the human linediverge?

There are at least four schools of

thought which we can call the "late-late", the "late", the "early" and the"early-early". Personally, I favour thelate school but there is something tobe said for the early school whichwould hold that the human lineagedates back to Propliopithecus, some30 million years ago.

The late school favours the earlyMiocene species from Kenya, EastAfrica, called Proconsul africanus (orsomething very like it) as a likely can¬didate. We know a little bit about the

gait, the skull and the teeth of P. afri¬canus. The gait was quadrupedal andtherefore provides no particular hintof future bipedalism; the hands are ra¬ther human-like In proportion but theevidence of an advanced type of pre¬cision grip is absent; the opposability

index has been estimated at 56. The

brain is still rather primitive but wasquite large in terms of body-size, andthe teeth like those of Aegyptopithe¬cus are ape-like rather than man¬like, but not so completely specializedthat one could not envisage an evo¬lutionary reversal to a human-like form.

During Miocene times volcanic act¬ivity, rift-valley .formation and moun¬tain-building were in full swing. Oneof two consequences of this orogenyand the coincidental cooling of theearth's surface, which had been stead¬ily proceeding throughout the Tertiaryera, was the spread of grasslands atthe expense of forests. Grasslands(or savannas) offered new evolution¬ary opportunities to a variety of mam¬mals, including the expanding popula¬tion of primates in the rapidly shrink¬ing forest zones.

A few primate stocks, including the

ancestors of man and the ancestors of

the modern baboons, evidently react¬ed to the challenge of the changingenvironment. In this way new hori¬zons were opened up for our remotehuman ancestors, and for the evolutionof the critical hallmarks of mankind.

The earliest human ancestor as we

see it at present was a creature calledRamapithecus known from north-westIndia and East Africa. Our material

evidence for the potential humanityof Ramapithecus is slight and consistsonly of Jaws and teeth but is, neverthe¬less, very revealing.

Ramapithecus has a distinctly man¬like tooth form lacking all the ape-likecharacters seen In Aegyptopithecuszeuxis and Proconsul africanus. The

dental arcade Is rounded, the caninesare small and the molar teeth do notIncrease In size from front to back as

in the apes. Ramapithecus lived bet-

BABOONS

TREE SHREWS

OPOSSUM

TARSIUS

Drawing © W. Howells

NATURE'S HANDIWORK

The evolutionary process has provided man with hands of astonishing dexterity, combiningconsiderable strength with delicate precision. This drawing Is a combination of twodiagrams published In Dr. W. Howells' book "Mankind In the Making", Doubleday and Co.Inc., New York, 1959.

CRANIAL

VOLUME

(cmJ)

500i-

IOOO

500-

THE EXPANDINGBRAIN OF MAN

3 million yearsof growth

HOMO SAPIENS

HOMO ERECTUS

HOMO HABILIS «,-**

AUSTRALOPITHECUS ^.«^.

million years1.75 0.7 0.2 O

Graph shows how the growth of brain capacity has turned modern man into an "egghead".To make comparison easier the fossil remains of a Homo habilis skull are shownsuperimposed on the outline of a present day skull.

ween 12-14 million years ago but ofcourse his ancestors may have evolvedseveral million years before this date.

The next recognizable stage in thehuman lineage started, apparently, atleast 4-5 million years ago. There isfragmentary evidence that pre-humancreatures belonging to the genus Aus¬tralopithecus existed in two areas ofEast Africa, called Kanapoi and Lotha-gam. We pick up the trail of thesenear-men two million years later In thearea of Lake Rudolf, again in SouthAfrica, and in Tanzania at OlduvaiGorge; in all these regions they aremost prolific. The early (Lothagamand Kanapoi) australopithecines donot tell us very much, but the laterforms in East and South Africa show

many of the characteristics of the gait,brain-size and tooth form that we are

searching for.

Australopithecines are generally re¬garded as near-men. Technically, un¬der the curious rules of current an¬

thropology, they do not qualify for theaccolade of human beings, but at Ol¬duvai Gorge 1.75 million years agosome of us accept the fact that thezoological genus Homo (man) firstmade his appearance.- His way of lifeappears to have been that of a scaven¬ger, a hunter of small game, and a tool-maker.

Homo habilis, as this early man iscalled, was a bipedal walker and prob¬ably a "strider"; his brain was stillsmall by modern standards but biggerthan his predecessors', and his teethshowed a slight advance on the teethof the australopithecines. His hands

were of a human type but lacked therefinements of precision grip possess¬ed by modern man.

Homo habilis was succeeded in the

fossil record by Homo erectus, knownfrom South-East Asia (Java), Asia(China), Europe (West Germany) andboth North and East Africa. EarlyHomo erectus (from Java) had a big¬ger brain than Homo habilis (H. habilis,656 cc; H. erectus 935 cc) and the latermanifestations of this species, fromPeking for example, showed a maxi¬mum brain-size of 1,225 cc.

IIN spite of this large brainvolume, Homo erectus possesses askull of primitive and easily recogni¬zable shape. His gait is assumed tohave been both bipedal and striding.The form of his hands is unknown, sothe only guide to the extent of hisdexterity are the tools that he made.These fall broadly into the class of"power tools", stone artifacts of simpleconstruction designed for relativelycrude purposes such as killing andskinning animals, cutting wood andpounding vegetable products. It hasbeen shown by experiment that thesecould have been constructed and usedin the absence of an advanced form

of precision grip.

Perhaps it was an increase in brain-size that stimulated the evolutionaryimprovement of the hand, but perhapsIt was the other way about. Anyhow

it seems highly probable that the com¬plexity of the brain, the precisioncapabilities of the hand and theevolution of "precision tools" wereclosely interlinked.

Exactly where and when Homo erec¬tus passed the baton in the human re¬lay-race to Homo sapiens is notknown. It may have happened in dif¬ferent parts of the world, at differenttimes, and in different ways. Thereis no saying which geographic popula¬tion of early men did it first.

With the evolution of Homo sapiens,which is dated somewhere between

250,000-400,000 years ago, our railwayjourney Is almost at an end and weare entering the suburbs of the metro¬polis. Most of us can begin to put onour overcoats and lift our cases down

from the rack. The engine-driver hasread the signals correctly, the signal¬man has done his Job and our workis virtually over over for some, butnot for all. The complexities of the sub¬urban system are still to be nego¬tiated, and for certain experts this partof the trip ¡s a matter of deep concern.

They are the specialists In thegrowth of agriculture, of citizenship, ofsocial and political systems, of thespread of populations and the Inter¬mingling of genes, processes whichare leading us slowly but inexorablytowards the eventual unification of

mankind in a single biological andcultural entity. Only when the traincomes to a final stop at the terminus

at some future date will these peo¬ple reach for their overcoats and suit¬cases and dismount.

45

ANTARCTICA, SIBERIA

OR ACROSS THE PACIFIC...

Where did

the first Americans

come from?

by Juan Comas

W,

46

HERE did the first inhabi¬

tants of America come from? At what

time in history did their immigration tothe American continent begin? Theseare the first questions we must ask our¬selves before seeking to determinethe biological and cultural traits of thefirst settlers in America.

I have used the terms "immigration"and "settlers" on purpose, therebyexplicitly rejecting the belief com¬monly held at the end of the last cen¬tury and in the first decades of thepresent century, according to whichthe New World saw man evolve inde¬

pendently from earlier forms as in theOld World, and hence that early formsof man existed in the Americas manyhundreds of thousands of years ago.

This is the theory held by the so-called "autochthonlsts" who based

their beliefs on the discovery of boneremains on the American continent

attributederroneously to hominidsless evolved than Homo sapiens andunearthed In geological strata judgedto be also erroneously much olderthan has since proved the case.

Going counter to this belief is thefact that only the less evolved pri-

JUAN COMAS, born In Spain and now acitizen of Mexico, is internationally knownfor his work as an anthropologist. He ishead of the department of anthropology ofthe University of Mexico, and editor of theauthoritative 'Anales de Antropología', pub¬lished by the university in Spanish. Hewas for many years vice-president of theInternational Union for Anthropological andEthnological Sciences, and was a memberof both committees of experts on racialquestions set up by Unesco In 1949 and1955. (See bibliography inside back cover.)

mates, that is, lemuroid fossils corres¬ponding to the Eocene period at thebeginning of the Tertiary Era (some55 million years ago) have ever beenfound in America. As to the present-day living species, the New Worldcomprises only the simpler types ofsimians, known scientifically as platyr-rhines, but there is no trace of thehigher types of primates, calledcatarrhines, which include apes andthe anthropoids.

As for the ancestors of Homo sap¬iens, such as the pre-hominids andhominids, they are completely un¬known to the Americas though theyhave been found in Africa, Asia andEurope. All of the prehistoric boneremains found on the American con¬

tinent indisputably belong to modernman and hence are much much more

recent than any of the more primitiveforms such as Homo erectus or Nean¬

derthal Man discovered elsewhere.

Many suppositions have been ad¬vanced over the years (and passion¬ately argued) to explain where thefirst settlers in America came from.

The list includes the Phoenicians, He¬brews, Etruscans, Egyptians, Sumer¬ians and Aryans, but no scientificallyvalid proof for any of these supposi¬tions has been forthcoming, nor, forthat matter, for the existence of the

imaginary, fabulous Atlantis as thebirthplace of the first Americans.

Certain writers in the 19th centuryand even in the present century tookit for granted that all the Indians ofAmerica stemmed from a common bio¬

logical stock. This gave rise to thecommon saying that: "all Indians arealike in colour and other features.

When you've seen an Indian from oneregion you have seen them all."

This was based on the Idea that all

the migrants to the New World wereMongols of Asian origin who hadcrossed the Bering Straits at differentepochs going back no earlier than20,000 to 25,000 years ago. Accord¬ing to this hypothesis, the physical andcultural differences observed amongthe Indians of the Americas can be

explained in two ways: partly by thedifferent degrees of biological evolu¬tion of the migratory groups that cros¬sed north-east Asia in the course of

thousands of years; partly by the dif¬fering environments of the variousregions of America the settlers estab¬lished themselves in.

Other scientists, however, are of theopinion that from remote antiquity

CONTINUED PAGE 48

Diagram shows some of the animalsthat lived In America from 40,000 B.C.to 7,000 B.C. Now extinct "giants"such as the mammoth and the camel

then roamed the land in great numbersand herds of horses are known to have

existed 40,000 years ago. Weaponpoints used by America's prehistorichunters to bring down their animalquarry are shown at right Spearheadshave been found still embedded In thefossil remains of some animals. The

Stone Age Indian could make a newweapon point in a few minutes evena neatly polished axe within hours sohe did not always bother to pull outhis spearhead for re-use or cut It outwhen the shaft had broken off.

CULTURES

FOLSOM

DATES

10,000to

7,500

11,000to

9,000

ANIMAIS HUNTED

Long-horned bison

Long-horned bison

PROJECTILE

POINTS

LLANO 15,000to

11,000

Mammoth

SANDIA

Mammot

25,000 (?)to

12,000

Horse

EARLIER

PERIODS

38,000 (?)to

20,000 (?)

Mammoth

Sabre-toothed ^tiger

Scrapers

?\

^^»-Xv^i^

Drawing © Editions Le Seuil, Paris, 1970, from "Lea Indiens", by Peter Farb

THE FIRST AMERICANS (Continued)

Deep in the heart of Texas 40,000 years ago

48

there coexisted on American soil

human groups of different physicalcharacteristics and of different origins.All the scientists who support this"multi-racial" thesis nonetheless

unanimously agree that the Mon¬goloid element that crossed the Ber¬ing Straits from Siberia at differentperiods of migration by far dominatesall other groups.

According to Paul Rivet, formerdirector of the Paris Musée de

l'Homme, the populations of pre-Col¬umbian America are the result of mi¬

grations to the continent of four racialgroups: Mongols and Eskimos via theBering Straits, Australoids and Malay¬an-Polynesians across the Pacific.Rivet based his conclusions not onlyon the findings of physical anthropo¬logy by studying data on physicaland other characteristics of Indian

groups from southern South Americaand those of Indians from certain

areas in Brazil, Baja California andEcuador, but also on cultural and lin¬guistic analogies with populationgroups in Oceania.

A. Mendes Correa, of Portugal, ad¬vanced the theory that an Australo-Tasmanian human element populatedAmerica not by sailing across thePacific but by marching across An¬tarctica, island-hopping across thestring of archipelagos between Tas¬mania and Tierra del Fuego at thesouthern tip of South Americal

Mendes Correa has indeed demons¬

trated that between 15,000 and 6,000

B.C., Antarctica was free of glacial iceand actually had a temperate climateat the time. Obviously, no archaeo¬logical proof exists to confirm thisAntarctic migration hypothesis, and itwill be extremely difficult, not to sayimpossible, to uncover any evidencewith the permanent ice cap now cover¬ing all of the Antarctic continent.

According to Jose Imbelloni of Ar¬gentina, one cannot truly understandthe racial and cultural history of earlyAmerica without taking into accountthe contribution of the peoples ofsouth-east Asia. Imbelloni conclu¬

des that seven distinct racial groupsmigrated to America : Tasmanoids,Australoids, Melanesianoids, proto-Indonesians, Indonesians, Mongoloidsand Eskimos. In his works he descri¬

bes and delineates a total of 11 typesof Amerindians.

More recently (1951) Joseph Birdsellof the U.S.A. sharply criticized thecontradictory views concerning thepopulation of the Americas put for¬ward by various multi-racial exponentssuch as G. Taylor, R.B. Dixon, H.S.Gladwin, E.A. Hooton, E.W. Count, F.Weidenreich and J. Imbelloni. He

advanced his own hypothesis thatAmerica had been settled by a mixtureof two racial groups, Mongols and"Amurians" or archaic Caucasoids who

had also reached the New World vianorth-east Asia.

As proof of this dual origin, Birdsellclaims to have found "Amurian" traits

in contemporary American Indians,among the Cahuillas of the interior ofLower California and among the Yukiand Porno of the northern Californiancoast. But if the Indians of North andSouth America were indeed the result

of the mixture of only the two Mongo¬loid and Amurian strains, there oughtto be a much greater similarity inblood groups than has actually beenobserved, particularly as regards theA-B-0 and M-N groups.

There have been repeated efforts toestablish similarities and Indeed possi¬ble contacts between the'redskins"of the Atlantic seabord of the United

States and the prehistoric Caucasoidman of the Cro-Magnon type who peo¬pled western Europe at the beginningof the Upper Palaeolithic or Old StoneAge. Such claims cannot be dis¬missed since they do contain an ele¬ment of possibility but no proof of anykind has yet been forthcoming.

ROM the above we can

summarize our conclusions concerningthe first inhabitants of the Americancontinent as follows:

1) No authochtonous human popula¬tion ever existed in America.

2) Never was there nor is there nowany biologically homogeneous Amerin¬dian type. .

3) The overwhelming population mi¬gration consisted of Mongoloids.

4) There is still doubt and debate asto what and how many other humantypes also populated America, themost widely accepted hypothesesbeing 2 (Birdsell), 4 (Rivet) and 7(Imbelloni).

The advocates of each of these

hypotheses naturally explain thephysical and other differences betweenthe various types of Amerindians indifferent ways, and no definite conclu¬sion can, of course, be reached untilmore extensive data is obtained.

However, the large number of arch¬aeological explorations carried out inrecent years in various parts of theAmericas has unearthed a rich store

of stone implements and other objectsas well as, to a lesser extent, fossi¬lized human remains which, with ourmodern dating techniques includingCarbon-14 now permit us to establishwith relative certainty when man firstappeared in America and a chronolo¬gical time-table of his presence there.

Thus we now know that man was

present in the United States, for exam¬ple, as early as 38,000 B.C. at a sitefound at Lewisville, Texas. Other pre¬historic sites have been clocked at

27,650 B.C. (Santa Rosa, California);19.500 B.C. (La Jolla, California); 8,505B.C. (Gypsum Cave, Nevada); 7,883B.C. (Plainview Site, Texas); and 6,274B.C. (Allen Site, Nebraska). In eachcase we must allow a few hundred

years or more plus or minus as iscustomary for C-14 readings. Thepeople who lived in this area between40,000 years ago and 8,000 years agowere all hunter-gatherers.

The oldest human settlement in

Mexico has been found to be Tlapa-coya in Mexico State where a disc¬shaped file and an obsidian knife havebeen unearthed dating back to20,200 B.C. (plus or minus 2,600 years)and 21,150 B.C. (1,950 years) respecti¬vely. Later prehistoric sites are alsoknown, of course, which show thatthey too belonged to hunter-gatherers.

Here are a few examples of datingsfrom South America (plus or minusyears are omitted): crude stone toolindustries in Venezuela (14,375 B.C.and 12,275 B.C.); cultural remains inLagoa Santa, Brazil (8,024 B.C.); pre-ceramic lithic culture in Lauricocha,Peru (7,566 B.C.); Inithuasi Grotto atSan Luis, Argentina with a pre-ceramiclithic industry (6,068 B.C.); a culturalcomplex on the high terraces of theGallegos river in southern Patagoniadating from between 10,000 and7,000 B.C.; excavations in Chile(9,380 B.C.) and elsewhere in southernPatagcmia (8,760 to 6,700 B.C.).

From the above examples a veryinteresting observation can be made,namely, that as we proceed southwardthe datings of the hunting and gather¬ing cultures are less ancient. Is thisa confirmation of the thesis that the

settlers of America came exclusivelyby way of the Bering Straits and thatSouth America was therefore peo¬pled many millenia later than NorthAmerica? I believe it is still too earlyto say and we must wait for furtherresearch and investigations.

IIT is generally agreed, forthe moment, that the oldest date of38,000 to 40,000 years ago corres¬ponds to the beginnings of the warm¬ing up period of the last Ice Age inNorth America (known as the Wiscon¬sin glaciation) when it was possible tocross from eastern Siberia to Alaska

and thereby reach the more temperateregions of southern North America.

Culturally, the first hunter-gatherersevolved until they became sedentarygroups after learning to cultivateplants and domesticate animals. Thiswas a slow and gradual process, butwe have evidence of prehistoric siteswhere hunter-gatherer tribes weresimultaneously engaged in the cultiva¬tion of squash, chile beans and later,maize.

Photo © H.W. Silvester - Rapho. Paris

CAVE DWELLERS OF THE AMERICAS. Dating by modern scientific methods of recently discov¬ered stone implements and fossil human remains in various parts of the Americas show that manwas present in the United States as early as 38,000 B.C., in Mexico by about 20,000 B.C. and asfar south as Patagonia between 10,000 and 7,000 B.C. Many finds have been made in cavesonce occupied by Stone Age man. Photo shows a more recent site, known as the "MummyCave" In the grandiose setting of Chelly Canyon In the state of Arizona. Here hundreds of cavedwellings and graves containing mummies have been found showing that it was occupied by manright down to historical times. Ruins at entrance date from later pre-Columbian Indian times.

Such agricultural sites have beenfound at Tamaulipas, Mexico, datingback to between 7,500 and 5,500 B.C.,at Sierra Madre, Mexico (4,500 -2,500 B.C. and 5,000-3,000 B.C.). Inthe Tehuaca area of the State of Pue¬

bla in Mexico several prehistoric siteshave been unearthed offering definiteproof of the existence of agriculturebetween 6,000 and 5,500 B.C.

In New Mexico (USA) agriculturallevels have been found at a site

known as Bat Cave dating back toabout 3,300 B.C. while in the PeruvianAndes agricultural complexes datingbetween 4,700 and 3,000 B.C. havebeen found at Huaca Prieta, Nazoa,Paracas, Chuica, and other sites.

The evolution from the hunter-gath¬erer stage to agriculture occurred InAmerica independently of the samedevelopment in the Old World. Re¬search In plant genetics, ecology andethno-history as well as chronologicaldatings have effectively demonstratedthis, thus refuting the thesis that agri¬culture was introduced into Americafrom Asia.

The initial phases of an agriculturaleconomy are known to have occurredin different parts of America, first withseasonal sedentary settlements andthen year-round permanent agricultu¬ral sites. Central America and the

Peruvian-Bolivian area are at leasttwo of the centres on the continent

which originated the cultivation of cer

tain species of plants. Graded terra¬ces and Chinampas (incorrectly called"floating gardens") are two typicaltechniques used here in early inten¬sive agriculture.

From this point we see the begin¬ning of a new process of development,the so-called "high cultures" basedon what Gordon Childe has termed

the "urban revolution", depending onextensive cultivation of maize, yucca,potato, beans and squash as well asthe manufacture of ceramics, the useof polished stone implements and thebeginning of the textile industry, etc.

In Meso-America (Mexico, Guate¬mala, parts of Honduras and El Salva¬dor) the high cultures began around1,500 B.C. in the highlands. This wasthe case with the Toltec, the Aztec

and Zapotee civilizations which endedwith the arrival of the Spaniards in the16th century. The Olmec, Maya andTotonec civilizations emerged in thelowlands a little later than 1,500 B.C.

In the Peru-Bolivia area, both alongthe coast (Huaca Prieta, Cupisnique,Paracas, Mochica, Nazoa, Pachaca-mac, Chuncay and Inca civilizations)and in the Andean uplands (Chavin,Cajamarca, Huaylas, Huilca, Qalas-saya, Tiahuanaco and Inca civilizations)the high cultures began to developabout 1,600 B.C. until their decline atthe end of the 15th century A.D.

Alongside these great civilizationsthere also existed much less advanced

cultural groups, hampered no doubt bythe rigours of their surroundings andhabitat. Notable amongst these werethe populations living in the great rivervalleys of the Amazon, Orinoco andParana as well as their many tributa¬ries.

From the 16th century, with theconquest, colonization and accultura¬tion stemming from the arrival of Eu¬ropean immigrants, the original Indianpopulation of America underwent thefollowing three major modifications:

1) The Indians have dwindled to thepoint of extinction, as in Uruguay,Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic andPuerto Rico; or a reduced number are

confined to reservations, as in the Uni¬ted States.

2) The Indian population still existsbut has little contact with the, rest of

the country, living within its own self-sufficient economy, virtually untouchedby the process of acculturation. Suchpopulations are found in the Amazonand Orinoco river basins, easternPeru, Bolivia, Ecuador, etc.

3) Large-scale intermingling of raceshas taken place to the extent that themajority of the inhabitants are biologi¬cally and culturally mixed, thoughsmall pockets of Indian populations,where less intermingling and accul¬turation have taken place, continue toexist, as in Mexico, Guatemala, theAndean plateau regions of Ecuador,Peru and Bolivia. M

49

Early manand the emergenceof races

by Vsevolod P. Yakimov

50

HE 3,500 million humans

on our planet comprise an astonishingconglomeration of peoples. Amid thisvast variety, anthropologists distinguishbetween groups of people having acommon origin, living, or having lived,in certain defined regions, and poss¬essing differing characteristic featuresin their facial structure, skin colour

and colour and type of hair.

Scientists call these groups races,but we should remember that there

are no strict lines of demarcation bet¬

ween races. All these groups blendimperceptibly into one another withintermediate types possessing variouscombinations of physical charac¬teristics.

It can readily be seen that distinc¬tions between individual groups donot affect the basic traits that all peo¬ple have in common an upright pos¬ture, well-developed hands and feet,an intricately structured brain encased

in a big skull with a straight, highforehead, absence of a bony eyebrowridge, the presence of a prominentchin and a common structure of the

VSEVOLOD P. YAKIMOV, of the U.S.S.R.,Is Internationally famous for his work onprehistoric man. He has written over100 studies on primates and the evolution ofman. He Is director of the Research Insti¬

tute for Anthropology and the D.N. AnuchinAnthropological Museum of Moscow StateUniversity, and is a member of the ExecutiveCommittee of the International Union for

Anthropology and Ethnology.

speech organs. All humans have thesame number of chromosomes (46) inthe cell nucleus; primates have 48 andthe lower simians between 54 and 78.

Thus modern man is biologically uni¬form in basic features and polymor¬phous as regards many secondaryfeatures, and scientists consider all

human beings as belonging to thesingle species, Homo sapiens. Thevariations found in groups living indifferent geographical areas reflectonly a differentiation within the singlespecies due to a host of biological,social and other factors.

The emergence of the earliest Homosapiens was preceded by the stage ofthe "oldest" (palaeoanthropus) andthe "old" (late palaeoanthropus) peo¬ple, though it Is important to notethat late palaeoanthropus co-existedwith early Homo sapiens in adjoiningterritories.

The genetic relationship betweenvarious groups of palaeoanthropus andHomo sapiens is a matter of consid¬erable controversy. The question onwhich anthropologists are divided iswhether all groups of palaeoanthropescan be considered as the ancestors of

modern man and whether modern man

developed in one or several regions.

In modern anthropology there aretwo schools of thought on the originsof man and the major races the poly-centric and the monocentric schools.

The founder of the polycentrictheory, the American anthropologistFranz Weidenreich, assumes that mod¬

ern man evolved in several regions,relatively independent of one another,and that people developed at differentrates. His theory claims that modernman evolved from the "oldest" and

"old" people In each region and thatthis gave rise to the formation of themajor races Europoid, Negroid, Aus-traloid, Mongoloid, etc.

Anthropologists of this school, suchas G. Debetz and V. Alekseev of the

U.S.S.R. and Carleton Coon and

C. Loring Brace of the U.S.A., pointout that representatives of the modernraces still possess traits typical of thefossil remains found in territories

where these races once lived.

N the other hand, mono-

centrists, Henri-Victor Vallios and

G. Olivier in France, Francis Howell

in the U.S.A., Kenneth Oakley in Bri¬tain, Victor Bunak, M. Nesturkh, Y. Ro-glnsky and myself In the U.S.S.R.,among others, consider that modernman evolved in a single region. Pro¬fessor Roginsky believes that Homosapiens emerged in a relatively widearea covering west Asia, parts of cen¬tral and south Asia, and north-east

Africa. Here various groups of pa¬laeoanthropes interbred, enriching thegenetic stock and triggering off thedevelopment of modern man.

The ancient Homo sapiens whoevolved there did not possess clearlydistinguished traits of any of themodern races. In a certain sense he

was "neutral" in racial aspects, andcharacteristics of the modern races

were present in him in the most diversecombinations.

It was only when human groupsspread geographically and settled Indefinite territories that racial typesevolved. That is why the races ofmodern mankind resemble one another

so closely. This resemblance is asign of their common origin, of theiremergence in a single region.

The monocentrists, who believe that

mankind passed in its evolution

through the palaeoanthropus stage,do not, however, maintain that every

CRO MAGNON

Two major schools exist today regarding theorigins of man and different races: the mono-centric or unilinear school believes that all

races evolved from a single ancestral line(diagram above); opposed to this, the poly-centric school sees the modern races of

man descending from four ancestral lines(diagram right) which evolved in severalregions of the earth.

AUSTRALIANS MONGOLOIDS EURASIANS

PITHECANTHROPUS'. SOLOENSIS

I fSolo man)

PITHECANTHROPUS

ERECTUS

(Java man)

PITHECANTHROPUSROBUSTUS

PEKING MAN

\\\

\ v / /\\ If\\ IIIIM

F§I

E

i>2

<0 »

local group of ancient people formedpart of the ancestry of modern man.For historical and natural reasons some

groups did not participate in the for¬mation of modern man, or participatedin that process through subsequentblending with already existing Homosapiens.

Some researchers, including myself,believe the late Neanderthals, the so-called classic Neanderthals, who lived

in the Early Wurm glacial period some50,000 to 35,000 years ago, to be oneof these groups. They differedgreatly from Homo sapiens in physicalrespects; they were short (150 to166 cm.), massive, with big headsand big, coarse faces, and they alsodiffered In their brain and hand

structure.

The late Neanderthals of Europe,

however, did not go up an evolutionary

blind alley. They too made consid¬erable progress in the development ofculture, society and speech. Yetcertain of their characteristics, their

inordinate physical strength and struc¬tural ungainliness, hindered and com¬plicated their transformation intomodern man.

This hypothesis is borne out by thepalaeoanthropus fossils of the moreprogressive "sapient" type found incentral and west Asia in the Teshik-

Tash caves, in the U.S.S.R. and theSkhul, Tabun and Çafzeh caves, inIsrael. It is highly significant that theyare older (about 60,000 B.C.) than the"classic" Neanderthals.

Fossils of ancient representatives ofHomo sapiens displaying some palaeo-anthropic traits have been found inthe Crimea and the Caucasus, in the

Mousterian culture sites generally

linked with Neanderthals. This can be

taken to indicate that the ancient

"sapiens" spread from the area oftheir origin to the west, where "clas¬sic" Neanderthals still existed at that

time.

Quite recently the Soviet scientistsA. Zubov and V. Alekseev expressedthe view that Homo sapiens emergedin two centres north-east Africa and

south-west Asia. This is a variant of

the polycentrist viewpoint, basedmainly on the differences between thespecific dental structures of ancientand modern man, and can in a sense

be regarded as a compromise betweenextreme polycentric and monocentricviews. Moreover, both centres fall

territorially within the fairly extensivearea the monocentrists regard as thecradle of Homo sapiens.

The most likely hypothesis, there-

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

51

THE EMERGENCE OF RACE (Continued)

52

fore, as to who modern man's ancestorswere and where and when they

emerged seems to be as follows.Modern man's ancestors were the

palaeoanthropes who possessed a setof "sapient" traits and inhabited westand south Asia and north-east Africa.

From this one area groups of Homosapiens spread to neighbouringterritories. As these Homo sapiens

populations, morphologically "neutral"in relation to modern races, were

migrating, settling and integrating, themodern races formed. Homo sapiens

probably emerged in the ancient"homeland" some 50,000 to 45,000

years before our time.

This view is confirmed in particularby data furnished by the British anthro¬pologist, Kenneth Oakley. He estab¬lished that the skeletons from Jebel

Qafzeh were 70,000 years old. Mor¬phologically "Qafzeh man" was atransitional form from palaeoanthropusof the "sapient" type to Homo sapiens.Radioactive carbon datings fix the ageof Homo sapiens fossils In Europe at35,000 to 38,000 B.C. The oldest fossilof modern man, the skull found at

Niah, on Kalimantan Island (Indonesia),displaying all the traits of fully formedHomo sapiens, is about 39,000 yearsold.

Many original theories have beenadvanced concerning the factors res¬ponsible for the development of Homosapiens. At the beginning of thiscentury the French archaeologistsGabriel and Adrien de Mortillet

considered changes in climate (fromhumid, sub-tropical to a dry climate)and the change from an arborealexistence (which they believed Nean¬derthal man to have led) to life on theground to be the main reasons for histransformation into modern man.

Later, H. Weinert (Fed. Rep. of Ger¬many) and V. Gromov (U.S.S.R.) andsome other scientists asserted that the

colder climate, caused by the advanceof the glaciers, had been the mainfactor in the progressive evolutionof the ancestors of Homo sapiens.

"TILL other scientists be¬lieve that the evolution of Neanderthal

man into Homo sapiens was due lar¬gely to the change from in-breedingwithin small scattered palaeoanthropicgroups to breeding between differentgroups, which thus put an end to thenegative consequences of incestuousbreeding. Naturally, every one ofthese factors was Important, but it isdoubtful whether they alone couldhave transformed Neanderthal man

into Homo sapiens.

In 1949 I expressed the view (it was

also arrived at independently by Fran¬cis Howell of the U.S.A. in 1951) thatselection in the severe conditions of

the pre-glacial period prevented ratherthan promoted the evolution of theclassic Neanderthals towards Homo

sapiens. The colder climate did notpromote mankind's progressive dev¬elopment and the severe living condi¬tions made the Neanderthal's physiqueeven more rugged.

Refuting the above theory, the poly-centrists point out that classic Nean¬derthals have been found in areas

far from the glaciers, notably in Iraq(The Shanidar cave) and in Israel (theWadi el-Amud site). But they ignorethe fact that these were not pure clas¬sic Neanderthals since they possessedsome "sapient" traits in the structureof the brain-case and the shape of the

cerebral hemispheres as shown bymoulds of the inner skull surface.

The formation of "sapient" featuresproceeded more actively on territoriesfree of glaciers. When we discuss"sapient" features, less importanceshould be attached to morphologicaltraits than to those traits of Homo

sapiens which substantially distinguishhim from his direct predecessor,palaeoanthropus.

Researchers have always beenstruck by the relatively high develop¬ment of the culture of Homo sapiens,as compared with that of Neanderthalman, by his ornaments and his flair,which his ancestors did not possess,for various forms of graphic art (sculp¬ture, stone and bone carving, poly-chromic mural painting, etc).

This testifies to a qualitative changeIn man's thinking, to a growing com¬plexity in the relations between peo¬ple and hence to a progressive dev¬elopment of social organization andforms of communication the emer¬

gence of speech.

Comparative studies of mouldsmade of the inner brain-case of palaeo¬anthropus and Homo sapiens fossilsshow that in the latter the areas of

the brain connected with purposeful

labour, that is physical activity, speechand the regulation of the individual'ssocial behaviour, underwent consider¬

able changes. Hence we can assumethat emerging Homo sapiens acquiredqualities important to man as a socialbeing. Groups of ancient people whoattained such qualities more rapidlyfound themselves better placed thanother socially less organized palaeo¬anthropic groups.

Professor Roginsky of the U.S.S.R.was one of the first to advance this

hypothesis. He drew attention also tothe relative stability of the featuresdisplayed by man as a species from

the moment of his emergence down toour own times, along with the astoun-dingly rapid advance of techniques andsocial development.

At the same time the replacement ofthe Mousterian culture, associated with

Neanderthal Man, by the late palaeo¬lithic culture, generally associated withHomo sapiens, proceeded against thebackground of great changes in man'sphysical type, so important to environ¬mental adaptation. During the transi¬tion from palaeoanthropus to man withhis present bodily structure, an evolu¬tion of the species took place atransformation of one type of man intoanother. It can be assumed that, in

primeval society, selection, which guid¬ed the evolution of the ancients,

stimulated their development intoHomo sapiens.

'NCE Homo sapiens hadevolved, social tendencies neutralizedand weakened the action of the

species-forming selective mechanisms,and thus assumed paramount import¬ance. Modern men began to resolvethe problems facing them, not somuch by adapting themselves to newenvironmental conditions which had

resulted in anatomical and physiolo¬gical changes in their ancestors, butby relying on and utilizing the fruitsof collective labour.

For this reason the physical type ofHomo sapiens underwent no majorchanges during many millenia, whereasthe range and complexity of his activi¬ties developed enormously. Althoughthe morphological changes that tookplace in Homo sapiens during the for¬mation of the major races were partlyadaptational, they did not change anyof man's traits as a species.

According to this viewpoint, Homosapiens is a supreme stage, in speci¬fic qualitative terms, of man's evolu¬tion, a stage characterized by a highlevel of social organization. In thisdevelopment of man as a social being,speech has played a major role bypassing on the experience and wis¬dom accumulated by many generationsand making possible their integration,along with new individual experience,in a collective store of knowledge.

Academician N. Dubinin, the So¬

viet geneticist, has aptly pointed outthat Homo sapiens is unique, since,with his advanced social awareness, hehas developed, In addition to the

hereditary programme possessed byall organisms, a second, non-genetic,non-hereditary programme "a pro¬gramme of social heredity" as Dubinin

calls it, which makes for man's pro¬gress in every new generation.

Students at Peking University make a plasterreconstruction of the head of Sinanthropus

or "Peking Man", who is believed to havelived 600,000 years ago. The originalSinanthropus skulls, found at Choukoutien,China, were lost whilst being transferredfrom Peking during the Second World War,leaving only a set of plaster casts andphotographs made in the 1930s (see p. 55).

/z

The

puzzle

of Peking

man

by Pierre Leroy

FATHER PIERRE LEROY, S.J.. of the FrenchNational Centre for Scientific Research, In

Paris, was formerly director of the Museumof Natural History, at Tientsin and of theInstitute of Geobiology, in Peking. He wasa friend and collaborator of Father Teilhard

de Chardin, and Is the author of 'Dans le

Sillage des Sinanthropes" ("In the Track ofSinanthropus"), Fayard, Paris (1971), whichpresents unpublished letter between Teilhardde Chardin and J. Gunnar Andersson, who

first investigated the Choukoutien site InChina where the remains of Peking Manwere discovered.

I HE discovery near Peking,in December 1928, of the very earlyfossil remains of a man, Sinanthropus,or Peking Man as he has been named,was an event of primary importance inthe history of the origins of man.

As early as 1914, the Jesuit priestand natural historian, Father Emile

Licent, had begun exploring the Basinof the Yellow River in the north of

China. There he had come across

some important layers of mammal fos¬sils "dragons' teeth" as the Chinesecalled them. Himself no palaeontolo¬gist, he sent sample fossils to Marcel-lin Boule, Director of the Institute of

Human Palaeontology in Paris, whoentrusted the task of examining andcataloguing them to one of his pupils,Father Teilhard de Chardin. Finally,in 1923, it was decided that Teilhard

should go to China to examine thefossil layers on the spot.

A French palaeontologlcal expedi¬tion was organized during which Li¬cent and Teilhard explored an area onthe edge of the Ordos desert, to thenorth of the Great Wall, where theydiscovered important layers of mam¬mal fossils and some chipped stoneswhich on examination proved to beextremely ancient. They concludedthat prehistoric man had once inhab¬ited these regions, but no humanremains were found which could helpto identify the craftsmen responsiblefor fashioning these stone implements.

In 1918, the Swedish geologistJ. Gunnar Andersson, founder of theMuseum of Oriental Antiquities atStockholm, was Invited out to China

to explore certain regions in northernChina for mineral deposits.

Johann Gunnar Andersson had

studied at Uppsala University which, in1710, had become the headquarters of

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

53

54

PEKING MAN (Continued)

the Swedish Royal Academy of Scien¬ces. Men such as Berzelins and

Linnaeus had made the Academy oneof the most renowned of Its kind in

Europe. Fresh from university, An¬dersson had taken part in Otto Nor-denskjold's dramatic expedition to theSouth Pole in 1901. After their ship,

"The Antarctic", had been crushed bythe ice, the members of the expedition

were taken aboard the Argentine war¬ship "Uruguay" and returned toSweden in 1903. Andersson became

a professor of Geology and, at theage of 32, President of the SwedishGeological Society.

Andersson began prospecting someforty miles to the west of Peking. Itwas a region of bare hills whose lime¬stone bedrock had opened here andthere and accumulated pockets of sun¬baked clay, the "red earth" of theChinese geologists. Here he discov¬ered a vast deposit of mammal fos¬sils in a perfect state of preservation.So rich was the find that he decided

to postpone its exploration until later,and in 1920 he returned to the site ac¬

companied by Dr. W.D. Matthew, apalaeontologist from the New York Mu¬seum of Natural History, and Dr. OttoZdansky, of the University of Uppsala.

In the course of the excavations,

Zdansky found, among the rubble ofbones, two teeth which he was unable

to identify; had they come from a mon¬key or from a man? Four years wereto pass before this puzzle was re

solved. In October 1926, to the gen¬eral surprise, Andersson took a definitestand the teeth found by Zdansky, hedeclared, were human, and a hominidhad probably lived at the site of thefind.

Then, two years later, Dr. BirgerBohlin of Uppsala University, discov¬ered a perfectly preserved lowermolar In the same quarry. There wasno room left for doubt, it was a humantooth, and the quarry In which it wasfound was to become world famous

the quarry of Choukoutien.

I|T was now certain that

prehistoric man had inhabited the vastterritory of Asia, from south of theriver Yenisei to Peking. But wherewere other remains of these creatures

to be found?

The spot to be explored was selec¬ted on the basis of Andersson's intui¬

tion and the discoveries of his collea¬

gues Zdansky and Bohlin. Since Li-cent and Teilhard had found no traces

of human skeletons in the Ordos de¬

sert, the search was concentrated on

Choukoutien. With the backing ofthe Rockefeller Institute at Peking andthe Geological Survey of China, ateam of Americans, Canadians, Chi¬nese, Frenchmen and Swedes set towork.

The enormous mass of earth of the

THE QUARRY

OF CHOUKOUTIEN

Choukoutien hill was systematicallydivided up into sections of two metressquare. Each cubic metre of earthdug up was carefully sieved so thatnothing would be missed.

Dr Pei Wen-chung, formerly a pupilof the Abbé Breuil in Paris, was in

charge of the excavations. FatherTeilhard, of the Geological Survey ofChina, was responsible for the strati-graphic study of the terrain.

The internationally famous prehis-torian, Abbé Breuil, was also to play

an important role. He had previouslystudied specimens from the Ordosdesert and had found traces of ancient

palaeolithic workmanship quite distinctfrom that known in Europe. He was,therefore, conversant with Chineseprehistoric tools and his opinionswould be of the greatest value if otherstone tools were found.

In December 1929, the dome of askull whether of a man or a monkeywas not known was found lying inthe sand under a limestone overhang.It was connected, perhaps rather pre¬maturely, with the human molar foundearlier by Bohlin. Were its discov¬erers right to dub it Sinanthropus orPeking Man, or were they led, bytheir desire to produce a startling dis¬covery, to take their dream for rea¬lity? At all events, monkey or man,the problem of Sinanthropus had nowbeen posed. How was it to be re¬solved? At that time there was no

Photo © Bertll Norberg, Stockholm

Far left, the north side of theChoukoutien quarry, nearPeking, where the first Sinan¬thropus skull was found by Dr.Pei Wen-chung in 1929. Farright, a Sinanthropus skull seenfrom above. During a decade,14 skulls, 14 lower jaws andnearly 150 teeth parts of 45individuals were found at

Choukoutien. Above, Profes¬sor J. Gunnar Andersson, theSwedish geologist, who firstexplored the Choukoutien site.Above left, Father Teilhard deChardin in 1931, the year heIdentified fragments of quartzfound near the skulls as tools

made by Sinanthropus.

Photo © Teilhard de Chardin Foundation, Paris

means of settling the question, theskull was so primitive and incompletethat there was no way of deciding itsreal nature.

Two criteria, tools and fire, enableanthropologists to decide whetherthey are dealing with the remains ofanimals or men. Tools alone are not

enough, nor is the ability to fashionthem absolute proof of human pre¬sence. In fact, under certain cir¬

cumstances animals are capable ofmaking tools. However, they lack thequality of foresight. Once a tool hasbeen used for its immediate purpose,it is abandoned, rather in the way thata young child may throw its spoonaway after eating its soup, not think

ing that it will be needed again in afew hours time.

Man is not only a craftsman; hisintelligence enables him to make abs¬tractions. He makes tools that will

last and this power of abstraction en¬ables him, unlike the animals, to make

and keep fire. When, therefore, ananthropologist finds durable tools andtraces of fire beside fossil remains

that could be either of monkeys or ofmen, he knows without doubt that theymust be the remains of men.

One day, Easter Monday in 1931, Ihad to go with Father Teilhard fromTientsin to Peking. Teilhard had beenaway from China for several monthsand he wanted to have a look at the

material from Choukoutien that had

been brought to the Cenozoic Labora¬tory. This was the laboratory inwhich studies were made of the geo¬logy and palaeontology of the periodfrom the Tertiary to the present day.

At the laboratory we met Pei Wen-chung with whom we had a long dis¬cussion. We were on the point ofleaving, when Teilhard asked him point-blank, "Hasn't anything really new beenfound at Choukoutien?" "No", re¬

plied Pei, "we are still turning up lotsof remains of stag, tiger, hyena andall kinds of small mammals". Then,

as an afterthought he added, "Oh yes,I found this." From the drawer of his

desk he took out a few fragments of

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

55

PEKING MAN (Continued)

The bone of friendly contentionbetween Father Teilhard de Chardin and Abbé Breuil

56

quartz which he handed to Teilhard.Teilhard did not hesitate for an instant.

At first glance he had seen that thesequartz fragments bore signs of delib¬erate shaping. "This quartz has beenworked", he said. Pei's delightknew no bounds. "So these stone

fragments found near skulls musttherefore be Sinanthropus' tools?""There Is no doubt about it", repliedTeilhard. "So Sinanthropus was a

man?" "That is my opinion", answer¬ed Teilhard.

Teilhard was even more sure of his

appraisal since," during his trip to Parisin the winter of 1930, he had visitedAbbé Breuil at thé Institute of Human

Palaeontology and had placed on hisdesk a small stag's antler on whichthere was a protuberance. "I shan'ttell you where it came from", he toldthe Abbé, "but what do you make ofthis object?"

"It was heated shortly after the ani¬mal was killed", replied the Abbé,"and it Is an implement fashioned byman by hammering the remains of theanimal's forehead with a stone ; the

marks of the stone's impact can beseen on the stem". "But it comes from

Choukoutien", replied Teilhard. "1don't care where it came from", repliedBreuil, "my conclusion remains thesame".

The quartz fragments found by Peiseemed, .therefore, to confirm , the

great prehistorian's opinion. It wasimmediately decided to send somequartz samples to Breuil in Paris sothat he could give his opinion on thisvitally important matter.

Without waiting for the Abbé's reply,Teilhard left for Kalgan where he wasto rejoin the Citroen motorized scien¬tific expedition which was about to setout for central Asia.

Meanwhile, at the invitation of theRockefeller Foundation, Abbé Breuil

went to Peking, towards the end of1931. He wanted to examine the Chou¬

koutien site for himself. He did not

support the view held by the anatomist,Davidson Black, his former pupil PeiChen-wung, and his friend Teilhard,and his preliminary assessment wasthat Sinanthropus was not a man. He

thought that he was more likely tobe some kind of game on which earlyman had fed, throwing his bones,along with tools and implements madefrom stags' antlers, into the Choukou¬tien quarry. Examination of the

quartz fragments showed plainly thatthey were deliberately fashioned,clearly recognizable tools. Yet there

was nothing to support the conclusionthat they were the work of Sinanthro¬pus.

This was how things stood whenTeilhard returned to Peking after along and wearisome journey acrossAsia. He immediately took up hiswork at the Cenozoic Laboratory. In¬formed by friends of Breuil's doubts,he re-examined all the samples broughtback from Choukoutien, comparingthem with the Sinanthropus remainsbeside which traces of fire had now

been found in the form of a layer ofcinders twelve centimetres thick.

Why did Breuil have such strongreserves, and how had he come to

think up the Improbable theory of thehunter and his game? The reason wasthat he could see no possible chrono¬logical link between the remains ofSinanthropus and the perfection of thestone and bone tools he was sup¬posed to have used.

Teilhard was not a man to allow

himself to be influenced only by"points of view". He wanted to base

his judgement on concrete evidence,and he communicated his own observ¬

ations to Breuil. After several letters

had been exchanged between the twomen, Teilhard was unable to convince

Breuil and Breuil failed to shake Teil-hard's convictions.

'PEAKING about Teilhard,Breuil wrote, "To my great regret hecontinues to stick to his original stand¬point. While Teilhard is a wonder¬

fully good observer of a geologicalsite and an excellent palaeontologist,he was not trained in technical prehis¬toric studies and the industrial aspectsare beyond him."

The point at issue between the twomen was that, for Teilhard, the quartztools found were the work of Sinan¬

thropus, while for Breuil, the fact thattools made of bone were also found

made this hypothesis seem extremelydoubtful.

The more value Teilhard placed onthe stone industry as indicative of thecapabilities of Sinanthropus, the lesssure he was of the specific nature ofthe bone industry. In a letter datedJune 17, 1932 to his friend George Bar¬bour he wrote, "A study on the stoneIndustry of Choukoutien will appearin the next Bulletin (of the China Geo¬logical Survey). It puts forward amore cautious view than that of Breuil.

I don't believe that a systematic boneindustry existed at Choukoutien."

A few months earlier (March 20,1932) he had expressed the sameopinion in a letter to J.G. Andersson:

Concerning Choukoutien, you havereceived Pei's paper (and possiblyBreuil's too) on the newly discoveredindustry. Since these two paperswere published we have collected oruncrated a large number of new sam¬ples including a large series of chippedboulders. I am sorry not to be infull accord with my dear friend Breuil.My present feeling is as follows:

1) The stones are certainly artifacts.

2) But, even in the case of the finestspecimens in quartz-crystal, the indus¬try looks very primitive. I have beenunable to recognize any true "pointe",for instance, nothing anywhere nearcomparable with the Mousterian pointsin quartz-crystal found in France.

3) The bone and antler industryseems to me to be more than ques¬tionable. I think that Breuil has been

deceived by appearances which occurin any bone deposit. Logically he isled to recognize a similar industry inthe Nihowan Saumerian beds, a sup¬position which, so far, cannot be ad¬mitted.

I hate this disagreement with Breuil,since I like him awfully and since I ampartly responsible for his coming toPeking. But what can I do?

The most critical point is to provethat, without any ' doubt, the tool-maker was Sinanthropus himself. Butthe fact that the jaws and a piece ofskull were found together with thetools seems as convincing as possible.

I am preparing with Pei a new paperon this question. What a pity youcannot come here for at least a few

weeks. We need youlGood luck in your work.

Teilhard de Chardin.

Teilhard and Davidson Black were

on their way back from the 1933 Inter¬national Geological Congress ofWashington when a cable reachedthem from Peking announcing a discov¬ery which could either decisively clarifyor further complicate the situation atChoukoutien.

At the very top of the hill of Chou¬koutien, where the site had been

broken up by previous excavations, atrench had been dug and a shaft sunk,at Teilhard's request, to give sidewaysaccess to the Sinanthropus layer atthe bottom left of the excavation ditch.

CONTINUED PAGE 65

by Victor Bunak

Man, the firstwalkie-talkie

CIENTISTS have longspeculated about the origins ofspeech, and a great many theorieshave been advanced.

One of the earliest, already currentin Ancient Greece, held that the first

words were onomatopoeias imita¬tions of the sounds prehistoric manassociated with his various activities.

Another maintained that words devel¬

oped from inarticulate cries of fear,alarm, delight and so on. Accordingto a fairly recent theory, it was thecombination of gestures and vocalnoises used to indicate a particularaction that led to the emergence ofspeech.

But none of these theories explains

VICTOR BUNAK, of the Institute for Ethno¬graphy of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences,is one of the world's leading authorities onthe early development of speech. He haswritten many studies on race, genetics, thetheory of the genesis of speech, etc., whichhave been widely published in the worldpress. Dr. Bunak Is a member of the Inter¬national Anthropological Association, theInternational Society of the Biology of Manand of many other anthropological societies.

how shouts or onomatopoeias couldturn into articulate syllables andwords, or what factors determined the

development of mental activity alongwith the faculty of speech so closelyconnected with it. For it is man's

ability to speak that above all dis¬

tinguishes him from the animal.

Modern science places the begin¬ning of human evolution in the earlyQuaternary period, some 1.8 millionyears ago, when a branch of bipedprimates appeared. These hominids,man's earliest ancestors, lived in the

open plains. They were omnivorous,eating fruit, green shoots, roots, birds'eggs, grubs and so on.

Since they were ill-equipped bynature for life in the open plains, theylearned to use objects as weapons todefend themselves and as tools to

obtain food: rocks to fling at theirenemies or prey, bone fragments toclean carcasses, sticks and shells to

dig up edible roots. These imple¬ments became essential accessories

to daily life, multiplying the strength

of the hands, extending their reachand replacing the long, sharp claws ofbeasts.

Animal behaviour is guided byinstincts by a chain of automaticallyconnected actions that never varies.

Actions based on choice and the

experience of much trial and error areextremely rare.

The chimpanzee, for instance, canuse a stick to reach a coveted bit of

food. If he Is given two short sticks,he will usually amuse himself withthem rather than try to use them toreach the food. If he does manageto join them together to attain thefood, he will have had to make so

many exhausting attempts that theresult has no practical significance.This is because the two percepts"action with the stick" and "makingthe stick longer" exist in his mind quiteIndependently. It is difficult for himto connect them or to substitute one

for the other.

The use of implements, not accident¬ally as with animals, but systematicallyas in the case of man, became

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

57

ORIGINS OF SPEECH (Continued)

58

successful only when the choice andtreatment of materials began tocorrespond to a preconceived aim, inother words, when an association wasestablished between a chain of

actions.

Man finally left the animal worldwhen he was at last able to reproducein his mind coherent images of differ¬ent objects and actions, to distinguishbetween them and to combine some

with others. This enabled man to

form percepts about the commonproperties of classes of objects. Themental ¡mages of these linked perceptsare what we call concepts, and thecapacity to form concepts was thefirst main feature distinguishing Homosapiens from the earlier hominids.

The next stage in man's evolutionwas the ability to combine and diver¬sify these concepts, a process thatrepresents a considerable develop¬ment of the intellectual faculty. Con¬cepts form the bricks of man's mentalactivity, and even the simplest amongthem differ substantially from the"concrete percepts" to which themental activity of animals is limited.

The combination of percepts in asingle mental operation or conceptbecomes possible because of itsassociation with vocal stimulations.

The link-up between the various per¬cepts takes place in areas of thecerebral cortex that are stimulated byimpulses coming from the vocal organsas well as those coming notably fromthe auditory organs. The sound ofthe voice and the correspondingmovements in the mouth and throat

become, as it were, symbols ofconcepts, a different set of vocalmovements being associated witheach one.

The vocal organs can produce agreat many sounds, but In each lan¬guage only some 30, known asphonemes, are used (sounds with adistinctive and differentiating function).There are, however, hundreds ofphoneme-combinations or syllables,and many thousands of syllable com¬binations. Even so, the resultingvocal sounds do not become elements

of speech until a specific semanticcontent or meaning becomes attachedto them, just as new concepts are notassimilated until they have been givenspecific vocal expression.

In the early periods of humanevolution, before definite speechsystems or languages existed, con¬cepts and words were formed simul¬

taneously. This is a dual processwhich consists of combining mentalpercepts and vocal movements. When

a man thinks, even if he does not

pronounce words aloud, his speechorgans make rudimentary movements,

CONTINUED PAGE 69

For some 200 years many people accepted without question the idea thatthe world was created in 4004 B.C., a date carefully worked out in the 17th cen¬tury by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, on the basis of the ages ofAdam and his descendants as recorded in the Old Testament. AlthoughArchbishop Ussher was a great scholar, an expert in Semitic languages andthe author of several important studies on ecclesiastical history, his nameis today chiefly remembered by many people for the precise date he unfor¬tunately fixed for the Creation, before the birth of the science of palaeontology.

Old fossils and

antediluvian theoriesby Louis S. B. Leakeyand Vanne Morris Goodall

Text © Copyright. Reproduction prohibited

REHISTORY is a compara¬tively new branch of science but therecords of man's preoccupation withthe riddles of his origins go back tothe dawn of history. In his earlysearch for the truth man drew uponthe riches of his imagination, andstrange stories, which were Invented, toexplain the mystery of creation, can befound in the myths and legends ofmany peoples.

As the centuries passed, however,man began to look for a rational expla¬nation of the mystery of life throughthe study of nature. This led ultima¬tely, as we shall see, to a bitter con¬flict between the Church and the pio¬neers of the science of prehistory,which began in the eighteenth centuryand was brought to a climax in 1859by the publication of Darwin's Originof Species.

The crude stone cutting tools whichwere made by our very early ancestorsare now accepted as the clues fromwhich we learn about their cultural life.

For many thousands of years, however,these Implements, fashioned from flint,chert, obsidian or other types of stone,lay scattered over the face of the earthand were regarded as mere "curiosi¬ties of nature". Some Greek philoso¬phers believed that these had beenlaunched by Zeus and called them"thunderbolts", and local superstitionin many countries invested them withmagical powers.

It was not until the latter part of thesixteenth century that Michael Mer-cati, physician to Pope Clement VIII,realized the true significance of theseso-called "thunderbolts". "Most men",he wrote, "believe that ceraunia (thun¬derbolts) are produced by lightning.Those who study history consider thatthey have been broken off from veryhard flints by a violent blow in the

days before iron was employed forthe follies of war."

Towards the close of the seven¬

teenth century, a London apothecary,John Conyers, who was describedby his friend John Bagford as a man"who made it his chief business to

collect such Antiquities as were dailyfound in and about London", dis¬covered "the Body of an Elephant".Not far away he came upon a pear-shaped stone. The two friends musthave examined and discussed this

stone on many occasions.

In Bagford's opinion, which musthave been met with a good deal ofscepticism at the time, it represented"a British weapon made of a FlintLance like unto the Head of a

Spear", which had been used in thedays before Britons knew the use ofbrass or iron. Bagford suggested,therefore, that the elephant was oneof the many which had been broughtto England during the Roman occu¬pation of Great Britain, and hadpossibly been slain with the stoneweapon discovered by his friendConyers.

It was nearly a century beforeJohn Frere made the next correctlyinterpreted discovery of man-made"stone tools". These stones described

by Frere as "spear-heads", werefound in the brick-earths in an ancient

valley at Hoxne in Suffolk, associatedwith the bones of extinct animals.

Laying aside the preconceived ideasof his generation, Frere had thecourage to announce what he believedto be the true significance of hisdiscovery. He not only .recognizedthe human origin of the tools, butsuggested that they belonged to avery remote geological period, anidea which was incompatible with the

persistent and widespread belief in auniversal flood in Noah's time.

This brilliant interpretation, however,was ignored by contemporary scientificopinion. It was not until 1859, whenthe brick-earths of Hoxne were re¬

visited, by the geologist Sir JohnEvans and by Sir Joseph Prestwich,that Frere's Interpretations wereverified and his place as one of thepioneers of prehistory was establishedfor all time.

It was not long before another vitallyImportant step was taken towardsthe unveiling of man's origins, whenthe true status of fossils (which hadpuzzled generations * of men) wasfinally established. Fossils are nowknown to be the remains of plants,shells and bones which have been

preserved by natural means in the

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

'UNVEILING MAN'S

ORIGINS'

Most of the major facts now knownabout man's evolution have been

uncovered during the past centuryand a half by a comparatively newbranch of science: prehistory. Thegrowth of this science and itsrevelations are described In "Un¬

veiling Man's Origins" by LS.B.Leakey and Madame Vanne MorrisGoodall, an Informative book publish¬ed by the Schenkman PublishingCompany, Cambridge, Mass., In 1969,and In 1970 by Methuen, London.In this article we present, by kindpermission of the publisher, extractsfrom the first part of the book,entitled "The Background", anddealing with the prelude to thescience of prehistory up until 1859when Charles Darwin published hisbook on the origin of species.

59

ANTEDILUVIAN THEORIES (Continued)

The date of Creation : 4004 B.C.

earth's crust, and altered In consti¬tution according to the influences towhich they have been subjected.They are of vital importance to theprehistorian for they supply the clueswhich he needs for the reconstruc¬

tion of the long procession of diversecreatures which have lived on our

planet.

The advanced thinkers of the eight¬eenth century came to believe thatfossils were of organic origin. Thenext step towards a better under¬standing of their true value was tofind out when the fossilized creatures

they represented had lived. It wasonly natural, in an age which wasdeeply influenced by religious doc¬trines, that enlightenment should besought in the Old Testament accountof the creation.

An answer which was acceptableto a very large number of scientistswas found in the story of "The Flood";this suggested that all creatures,except those saved by Noah at God'scommand, had perished under thewaters of a "universal deluge".

Clearly, then, it seemed highlyreasonable to accept the idea thatfossils were the remains of thosecreatures which had been drowned in

the Flood and buried under the debriswhich covered the earth when the

waters went down. This became

known as the "Diluvial theory" andwas strongly supported by the Church.

But there were a great many free¬thinkers who believed that this philo¬sophy was contradicted by theevidence of geology. Groups of fos¬silized animals, each differing fromthe others, had been observed insuccessive geological strata, indic¬ating clearly that they had lived atdifferent geological periods of time.If this was so, then they could notall have been drowned In one and

the same great flood.In order to accommodate the new

data, the famous French palaeont¬ologist Baron George Cuvier suggest¬ed that there had been a succession

of catastrophes, each followed by anera of calm during which the earthhad been restocked. He was careful,however, to fit this new philosophy

into the accepted biblical chronology.

God's first creation, he suggested,had consisted mainly of marinecreatures, his second of reptiles andhis third chiefly of mammals. Thesewere destroyed In turn and a fourthcreation, as described in the OldTestament, was ultimately sweptaway by "The Flood", with theexception of the inmates of the ark.

Launched by a man of such reput¬ation as Cuvier, the new "Catastrophictheory" gained immediate support;but a handful of advanced and

courageous thinkers began to suspectthat the duration of geological timehad been grossly under-estimated.

At this time the Church was still

blindly supporting the conclusionproposed by Archbishop James Ussherin 1654, that the world had beencreated in 4004 B.C. He had arrived

at this estimate by computing first _the ages of Adam and his descendants,'as recorded in the Old Testament, andthen by adding a number of yearsdeduced from a study of Hebrewhistory.

Dinosaur eggs and mammoth bone hutsFor centuries before the notion of evolution became generally accepted,men refused to believe In the existence of fossils dating back hundredsof thousands, even millions of years, and. all kinds of theories were putforward to explain the strange objects that were constantly beingdisinterred. One popular theory was that they were the remains ofcreatures that had perished in The Flood, and in 171.6 the Swiss doctorJohann Scheuchzer, seen in engraving left with a collection of fossils,even published a book entitled "Museum Diluvianum". Many years ofpatient research were required before the idea was accepted that theseobjects could be the fossilized remains of creatures such as thecarnivorous Gorgosaurus (top right) who inhabited the earth some75 million years ago. The amazing Dinosaur egg, bottom right, was oneof a huge quantity of eggs found a few years ago on a tract of landat Roques Hautes, in southern France, by the curator of the Museum ofNatural History of Aix-en-Provence. Below, a dwelling built In prehistorictimes entirely from Mammoth bones, discovered In 1966 at Miejiritch inthe Ukraine, U.S.S.R. The bones of 95 Mammoths were used In theconstruction of this dwelling which covers an area of 23 square metres.

Photo © APN, Kiev, Ukraine

Cuvier could not possibly fit threeadditional creations into this time scale.He therefore adopted the proposalsof Comte Georges de Buffon, a greatFrench geologist, and pushed thecreation of the world back by 80,000years.

The early part of the nineteenthcentury was remarkable for theintense interest which scientists in

Europe, England and America beganto take in cave exploration. Reportscirculating in 1822 claimed that thecaves in southern Germany hadyielded the remains of many extinctforms of animals, including those ofelephant, rhinoceros, hyena and bear.The news of these discoveries inspiredan English clergyman, Dean WilliamBuckland, at that time also Reader inGeology In the University of Oxford,to investigate the Paviland cave onthe Welsh coast. It was not longbefore Buckland made one of the

notable discoveries of the century.

The Paviland cave is set In à

limestone cliff and soon yielded astore of prehistoric treasures. Flintimplements, as well as ornaments andtools of bone and Ivory, lay embeddedwith the same species of extinctanimal which had been found in the

stratified caves of Germany. Withthem Buckland discovered a humanskeleton, stained with red ochre.This became popularly known as"The Red Lady of Paviland", thoughit was later found to be that of a youngman.

The problem of interpreting hisdiscovery placed Buckland in a difficultposition. As a geologist, he suspectedthat he had found the remains of a"pre-diluvial man". As a Christianminister and a Diluvialist, the tenetsof his faith precluded him from ad¬mitting it. In the end, he apparentlyallowed his conscience to dictate hispronouncement. He explained hisdiscovery by suggesting that althoughthe remains of the animals had

probably been swept Into the Pavilandcave by flood waters, the human bodymust have been intrusively buried ata much later date, when man hadsettled, in England long after "TheFlood".

A few years later a Roman Catholicpriest, the' Reverend John MacEnery,began to investigate the hugerambling limestone cave on the Devoncoast of England known as Kent'sCavern. He found man-made stonetools in association with the same

species of extinct animals that DeanBuckland had uncovered in the

Paviland cave; but unlike Buckland hedid not allow his scientific judgmentto be obscured by religious beliefs.

In spite of the severe criticisms towhich he was subjected by theChurch, and even by Buckland, FatherMacEnery remained convinced that hehad found sufficient evidence to

maintain that man had lived in Englandlong before the time of the "BiblicalFlood", as a contemporary of the

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

61

AN EARLY

'EVOLUTIONIST'

An early exponent of the doctrine ofevolution was the German zoologist Ernst

Haeckel (1843-1919). These drawings madeby Haeckel himself In 1866 some of manyhe produced for books on' biology illustrateone example of his theory of recapitulation,i.e. if a land animal had ancestors which

lived In water and used gills, each embryoof that animal continues to develop gillseven though they may be lost during laterembryonic development. They show (fromleft to right) fish, salamander, tortoise, bird,calf, pig, rabbit and human embryos. Atfirst stage (top row) all have gill-like organsto the right of the eye. At second stage(centre) limbs develop but "gills" are stillpresent At third stage (bottom) physicaldifferences are apparent and "gills" have

disappeared In non-aquatic creatures.

ANTEDILUVIAN THEORIES (Continued)

Drawing Ernst Haeckel

The earth begins to yield up its secrets

62

extinct animals whose remains he hadfound. The notebooks in which he

recorded his discoveries and inter¬

pretations were found and publishedmany years after his death.

Meanwhile, the extensive limestonecaves near Liège, in Belgium, hadbeen attracting the attention of anintrepid and dedicated palaeontologist.In the course of his explorations,Dr Schmerling of Belgium investigatedmore than forty caves along thebanks of the River Meuse and col¬

lected quantities of fossilized animalremains which were associated with

implements of stone and bone. Humanfossil remains were both fragmentaryand scarce, but since he found themembedded In the same strata,

Schmerling maintained, in spite ofopposition, that all three groups werecontemporary.

In 1833 he made the discovery forwhich he is famous. Day after day,month after month, he had beenvisiting a cave named Engis. Hisreward came at last with the discoveryof an almost complete "primate" skull.It was embedded five feet within the

breccia and surrounded by the remainsof extinct forms of elephant, bear,tiger, hyena, rhinoceros, reindeer andother animals which had disappearedbefore the beginning of what was thenaccepted as the time boundary of thelate Stone Age. In Schmerling'sopinion, this was conclusive proof thatman had been living in Europe "longbefore the Deluge".

Another discovery that was totallyIgnored during this period was madein 1848 in Gibraltar. This find, awell-preserved skull, was eventuallybrought to England in 1862, but it wasnot until the beginning of the twentiethcentury that its unique place ¡n thehistory of human evolution was finallyestablished. It represented, as weshall discover, the first recordedremains of Neanderthal man, whosehistory plays an important part in thestory of man's evolution.

It was largely due to the brilliantand indefatigable work of a French¬man, M. Boucher de Perthes, that thebalance of scientific thought wasfinally tipped in favour of those whobelieved in the existence of "ante¬diluvian man"

Boucher de Perthes was a lover

of antiquities as well as a greatscholar. In 1825, when he was about

forty years old, he was appointed tothe post of customs officer at Abbe¬ville on the river Somme. The gravelbeds in the valley of the Somme werecontinually being exploited for com¬mercial purposes and had alreadybeen investigated and found to containthe fossil remains of extinct animals.

These gravel beds naturally attract¬ed the attention of Boucher de Perthes,who soon began to notice that manycuriously shaped stones were dugfrom the gravel by, the workmen. Inspite of the fact that the gravel bedshad been assigned to the so-calledprediluvial geological period, Boucher

de Perthes was convinced that the

stones, which he began to collect fromthe workmen, were in fact "stonetools" which had been made by man.He was sure that he had found positiveproof of man's existence in Europebefore "The Flood".

He claimed that the soils outside

Abbeville contained stones worked by"antediluvial man", in association withthe fossil remains of large animalsbelonging to extinct species. Boucherde Perthes began to be regarded byscientists as a dreamer and a vision¬

ary. The Church dubbed him a heretic.He does not appear to have had onesingle supporter of any authority until1854, when he was visited by aDr Rigollot, a physician from Amiens,whose scepticism about the age andauthenticity of the "stone tools" fromAbbeville was well known.

Having examined the Abbevillestone implements, Rigollot returnedto Amiens and discovered that there

were similar stones in comparablestrata at St-Acheul near Amiens.

Completely converted, Rigollot rangedhimself enthusiastically on the sideof the opponents of the diluvialisttheory, and it is fitting that the workof these two pioneers of prehistoryshould be associated with two earlycultures of the Stone Age known asthe Chellean (or Abbevillian as it isnow called), and the Acheulean.*

* Chellean after the site at Chelles, Abbe¬villian after the site at Abbeville and Acheu¬lean after St.Acheul.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Is shown at left oneyear before his death.When he returned from his

voyage in H.M.S. Beagleat the age of 27, hebrought back with himspecimens of the 13 typesof finches (right) he foundIn the Galapagos whichwere to give him the clueto the relationship betweenvariation and adaptation.The traditional Idea of

creation maintained that

each of these 13 specieshad been separately creat¬ed and never varied.Darwin assumed that since

these species were fund¬amentally the same theywere descended from a

common ancestor and that

the variations were due to

adaptation to circumstan¬ces. Darwin was violentlyattacked from all sides

after the publication of"On the Origin of Species".The 19th century cartoon,below left, published InGermany, carried the cap¬tion "Darwin in consulta¬tion with one of hisancestors."

Photo © Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

We have already seen how thesignificance of a fossil human skull,found in a quarry in Gibraltar in 1848,went unrecognized. Nine years later,some workmen quarrying the limestonecliffs of a deep ravine near Düsseldorfin Germany made a similar remarkablediscovery. The celebrated Nean¬derthal cave (which has long sincebeen demolished), then opened halfway up the steep side of the cliff and,in 1857, the remains of a strangeindividual were found buried beneathits floor.

By good fortune, a medical doctor,who was interested in fossils, re¬covered the remains of this skeletonfrom the workmen and sent them toan expert anatomist for examination.The extraordinary character of theskull presented many problems. Thesewere made the more difficult andunhelpful because no other animalremains and no artifacts were found

nearby. There was literally no asso¬ciated clue to guide the scientists intheir estimation of the antiquity ofthese human bones. The find arousedintense interest in scientific circles.

It is to Professor William King ofQueen's College, Galway, in Ireland,that honour is due for being the firstscientist to recognize that the skullcap . from the Neanderthal cavebelonged to a representative of ahitherto unrecognized type of mankind.Although the vault of the skull was theonly well-preserved part of the fossil,King created a new species for its

reception and named It Homo neander-thalensis.

Scientists of the time were not then

ready to believe that the prehistoricworld might have been peopled bydifferent species of mankind. Manyof them therefore continued to regardthe Neanderthal skull as a pathologicalspecimen. More than half a centurywas to elapse before King's opinionwas endorsed by science and thefamous skull from the Neanderthal

cave accepted as representinga member of the species he hadnamed Homo neanderthalensis.

The first half of the century wasnow almost over, and the stage wasset for one of the most dramatic

moments in the history of science.Lyell and other geologists of the periodhad pushed the story of our planetback in time, presenting mankindwith a new and awe-inspiring conceptof a world which was old beyondimagining.

Their research had revealed that

great areas of land, now submergedby water, had once joined Asia toAmerica, Europe to Africa, and GreatBritain to the rest of Europe, so thatin prehistoric times both men andanimals could have wandered across

these land bridges from one con¬tinent to another. Evidence had also

been discovered to show that largeparts of the world had once beenfrozen in the grip of a great glacialepoch.

In Switzerland, between two glacialdeposits, geologists had found a bedof fossilized plants which could onlyhave flourished in a temperate climate.This, together with an accumulationof additional data, led them to believethat there must have been both glacialand ¡nterglacial stages within theGreat Ice Age.

From about 1850 on, the "Diluvial"theory rapidly lost ground. Not onlywas it untenable in the light of thenew geological data which werecoming to hand, but many scientistswere beginning to wonder whether theBiblical "Flood" had, in fact, been a"Universal Deluge", or merely a localflood confined to the area in andaround the Euphrates Valley, whereAdam and all his descendants, In¬cluding Noah, had reputedly lived.

Learned men throughout the ageshave speculated upon the number andcombination of species which Noahmust have packed into his Ark. Inthe sixteenth century the famousElizabethan sailor and explorer, SirWalter Raleigh, calculated that theremust have been "eighty-nine distinctspecies of beastes", but by the endof the eighteenth century this figurehad been doubled, and the estimatedproportions of the Ark had growncorrespondingly formidable.

The problem was aggravated byevidence which had now come from

such far-flung areas as Africa, Asia,America and Europe, that each con-

CONTINUED PAGE 66

63

PILTDOWN MAN

FOSSIL

FORGERY

In 1912, a British amateur geologist andantiquarian, Charles Dawson, reportedthe discovery first of parts of a skulland later of a jaw in a gravel pit atPiltdown in southern England, whichwhen reconstructed proved to be amodern human cranium possessing anape-like lower jaw. "Piltdown man", asthe remains became known, which

looked like a new kind of "missing link"between man and the apes, sparked offone of the longest and most sensationalcontroversies in the study of prehistory.~he remains were at first accepted asgenuine by a few authorities, but itbecame increasingly difficult to recon¬cile the Piltdown man with other finds.

t*.»*Y«*^

such as Java man and the African pre-men which had more ape-like skulls andmore man-like jaws. Finally, in 1953,special studies and tests proved un¬questionably that the Piltdown skullfragments were a fraud that theybelonged to a modern man and the teethand jaw to a modern ape. The materialhad been chemically treated and skil¬fully tampered with to make it appearancient and authentic, and it had been

planted in the gravel pit by an uniden¬tified hoaxer. One theory is that the

perpetrator aimed to embarrass theprehistorians of his time and underminethe entire idea of human evolution, still

strongly challenged in many quarters.With modern scientific dating methods,no "fossil" like the Piltdown man would

be likely to escape detection today.Above, Charles Dawson (standing right)and British scientists watch anatomist

Sir Arthur Keith measure the Piltdown

skull. The three skulls on left show,

in clockwise order, first, the Piltdown

skull, second a skull of modern man and

third, the skull of Java man.

ANTEDILUVIAN THEORIES (Continued trom page 63)

tinent had its own particular fauna.Forms ancestral to these animals had

been found In geological depositsformed before the Biblical "Flood"

could have taken place. Only bymeans of a miracle, therefore, couldNoah have collected individuals from

all the living species in the worldbefore the "Flood" and redistributedthem afterwards.

The controversy regarding theexistence of man in Europe beforethe "Flood" now began to die away,and scientists concerned themselves

with the chronology of glacial andinterglacial man and his culturalremains. Now that the true signi¬ficance of stone tools was appreciated,a vast wealth of data was beginningto accumulate about the social lifeand Industries of our remote ancestors.A succession of classified cultures

known as Stone Age, Bronze Age andfinally Iron Age had by now been estab¬lished.

Theories and ideas, suppressed forso long by religious prejudice, nowstruggled into the light, and wereapparent in the new and rationalapproach which was being adoptedin the search for man's origins. Manyof the old beliefs which had been

exaggerated by poetic fiction weretherefore swept away.

Wherever the curiosity of man ledhim to investigate and chronicle themarvels of the natural world, scientistsnow found themselves in the posses¬sion of a vast storehouse of know¬

ledge. It remained for someone topostulate a theory which would accountfor the diversity of life on earthand the ultimate miracle of mankind.

The idea of evolving life, which wasso soon to capture the imagination ofman, was not a new one. Until now,however, it had been stultified by thebigoted acceptance of the doctrine ofspecial creation, which maintained thatall species remained exactly as theywere when first created. A handful

of advanced thinkers of the late

eighteenth century, such as Carl Lin¬naeus, the famous Swedish naturalist,Erasmus Darwin of England, andLamarck of France, had put forwardrevolutionary ideas which were inopposition to the theory of immuta¬bility of species. It was, however,Charles Robert Darwin who finallygave the world a new concept of theanimal kingdom.

Today Darwin's concept of evolutionis so well known and so widelyaccepted that It is difficult to imaginethe magnitude of the sensation itcaused when it was published in 1859.The first edition of the book was sold

out very quickly and the reaction toits doctrines was immediate.

The Church saw it as a threat to

the very foundations on which thedoctrine of special creation and theliteral belief in Biblical chronology hadbeen built. It therefore attacked

Darwin with an almost fanatical inten¬

sity. The idea that a wise and powerfulGod had designed and created allliving things in a permanent immutableform, was part of the Christian faith.Many scientists, while recognizing thegenius of a theory which would with¬stand the most acid tests of logic,nevertheless turned from the idea of

the mutability of species on purelyreligious grounds.

Darwin himself was emotionallyInvolved in the conflict which his

theory of evolution had provoked, andhe always stressed that he had notbeen motivated by any anti-theologicalbias when he wrote the Origin ofSpecies. For those who came toaccept Darwin's theory, man beganto be regarded as the ultimate triumphof a process of evolution which waseven more miraculous and awe-

inspiring than was the concept of aspecial creation of each separate formof life.

Louis S. B. Leakeyand Vanne Morris Goodall

THE PUZZLE OF PEKING MAN (Continued from page 56)

In the course of this operation theworkmen discovered under the sedi¬

ment, at the top of the hill, a well pre¬served cave, which became known asthe Upper Cave. It had been used asa refuge by animals and by men.Human remains, including three well-preserved skulls of a much morerecent period than Sinanthropus, weremixed with fossilized skeletons of hye¬nas, bears, wild goats, tigers andstags, and ostrich and civet bones.Amid all this confusion lay evidenceof a quite different culture, fairly closeto the neolithic pierced teeth andshells, more finely fashioned stone,bone necklaces and polished stagantlers.

One very important fact emerged.A close study of this material and acomparison of it with that found atlower Choukoutien and the Ordos

desert revealed a number of affinities

and resemblances. Perhaps this wasdue to the similar nature of the stone

raw material found on these sites:

quartz, hyaline, silicified limestone andchalcedony, as well as pebbles usedfor hammering.

Nevertheless, the man of the UpperCave, more advanced and a better

workman, had found a way of piercingshells, teeth and even stones with

which to make necklaces, and the or¬

naments were always found in theimmediate vicinity of the skulls. Theindustry of the Upper Cave belongsto the close of the Palaeolithic era;

we are now at the beginnings of theadvanced era of shaped stone, theNeolithic era.

Thus the discoveries made ¡n the

Ordos desert in 1923 took on new

meaning. The heterogeneous stoneindustry uncovered by Licent and Teil¬hard was probably the work of menof differing races, brought to thisplace by migratory waves. It haslinks with Mousterian, Aurignac andMagdalenian industry. The man ormen of Ordos fill an intermediary posi¬tion between the two fossil forms

found near Peking.

Prehistoric men, one group as oldas Pithecanthropus, the other morerecent, Homo sapiens, inhabited the

Choukoutien site, using, at an inter¬val of some tens of thousands of years,the same raw materials for their indus¬

try a primitive industry of uneven yetalso inestimable value to the anthro¬

pologist, having specific, distinctivecharacteristics readily detectable tospecialists.

As far as the bone industry of theSinanthropus period is concerned, al

though it was positively identified anddefended by Abbé Breuil, it remains asubject of controversy to this day.

The friendly, scientific quarrel bet¬ween Teilhard and Abbé Breuil was

never finally resolved, each of themmaintaining his own position. Wasthis necessarily a bad thing? I do notthink so. It shows us how far a scru¬

pulous study of facts can leave menof science divided when they are con¬vinced that their reasoning is rigor¬ously objective.

Although, as far as I know, AbbéBreuil never went back on his opinion,he nevertheless sided with the spe¬cialists. Like them he saw in Sinanthro¬

pus a representative of a race of menin the full sense of the word, that is to

say, capable of handling fire andmaking use of quartz and pebbles ina way essential for his survival. Whathe did not accept was that all the stoneand bone tools found in the Choukou¬

tien layer were made by Sinanthro¬pus.

Let us hope that today's Chinesegeologists and anthropologists willreap as rich a harvest as their prede- nrcessors.and that, one day, they will QQgive us the long-awaited answer.

Pierre Leroy

_

The name of Mikhail Gerasimov is now internationally famous for hisreconstructions of the faces of historic world personalities (here three stagesin reconstructing the face of the great 14th century conqueror, Tamerlane),which led to his revolutionary work in the reconstruction of the features

prehistoric man.-

THE FACE-MAKERS

66

^^URIOSITY about the past Is an enduring characteristic ofmankind, and Interest In our predecessors Is not limited to the

hard facts of what they achieved and how they lived; equallyintriguing is the question of what they looked like.

Improved scientific methods of creating anthropological por¬traits from skulls, developed over the past few decades, haveenabled us to reconstruct the likenesses of such legendary figuresof the past as Ivan the Terrible and Tamerlane (see photos below).These methods have also made it possible to authenticate disput¬ed human remains, as, for example, in the case of the puzzle ofthe two skulls of the German poet Friedrich Schiller (see photostory page 68).

With historical figures such as these, records and descriptionsexist by means of which we can check the accuracy of our recon¬structions, but the task is not so easy when we attempt to createanthropological portraits of our prehistoric ancestors.

The first attempts to reproduce the outward appearance of earlyman were made during the last decades of the 19th century.Anatomists had established certain links between the shape ofthe skull and the flesh and muscles of the face. Such men as

Professor Schaffhausen of Germany and Professor Kohlman ofSwitzerland were pioneers In this field and during the first halfof this century several anatomists and anthropologists, sometimeswith the help of artists and sculptors, attempted to reproduce thefeatures of our early ancestors.

However, reconstructions made by different people of the sameNeanderthal skull from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, In France, wereso varied that it was clear that the methods used were inade¬

quate. A big step forward was made by the French anthropologist

by Mikhail Gerasimov

Marcellin Boule who reconstructed the basic muscles of the face,

neck and torso on the assembled Neanderthal skeleton from La

Chapelle, creating a figure with the characteristically stoopedspine, the short, forward-thrusting neck and protruding head.

I had been interested In this problem ever since I was aschoolboy and realized that before creating a portrait of prehis¬toric man we first had to learn how to reproduce the appearanceof contemporary man. For ten years I carried out research Intothe techniques for reproducing faces from skulls and, In 1937,I was able to formulate a method which has proved itself overmore than thirty years and has even been used by criminologiststo identify unknown persons.

Historical problems too were resolved by these methods. Why,for example, were Tamerlane and his son Shahruh of different

anthropological types? Tamerlane's skull Is Mongoloid, whileShahruh's Is Europoid. Proof of the blood relationship betweenTamerlane and his descendants Shahruh, Mironshah, Ulug-Begand Mohammed-Sultan was provided by the morphology of theirskulls; they all possessed the same asymmetrical form whichcould only be explained by heredity. Shahruh, however, inheritedhis Europoid features from his Tadjik mother.

When the family sepulchre of Ivan the Terrible was opened In1963 there was considerable doubt as to the authenticity of theskeletons found. The reconstructions I made corresponded per¬fectly with contemporary portraits of the Tsar (the right eyesmaller than the left, the heavy chin, the protruding lower lip,which combined to give him his "terrible" appearance) and of hisson (an Insignificant, harmless bald-head).

I was also able to identify with certainty the skull of the 11th

MIKHAIL GERASIMOV Is shown at right working on the recon¬struction of the face of an ancient skull in the Laboratory of PlasticReconstruction at the Institute of Ethnography of the U.S.S.R. Aca¬demy of Sciences, In Moscow, of which he was director until hisdeath in 1970. A special exhibition of his famous reconstructions ofprehistoric man was displayed at Unesco House In Paris in 1969.

century poet Rudakl; the eye orbits of his skull showed signsof atrophy resulting from the blindness with which he is knownto have been afflicted.

The comprehensive study of modern man by anatomical andanthropological methods, by X-Rays and photographs of livingpersons, provided a great deal of information about the complexrelationship between the structure of the muscles and soft Integ¬ument of the head and face and the skull. In the case of pre¬historic man the skull, of course, Is the only thing we have to go by.

The Individual features of man are determined by the propor¬tion, size and shape of the skull, its asymmetry, the degree ofrelief development, the structure of the surface, the vertical andhorizontal profiles, the structure of the nasal bones, size andshape of the teeth, their bite, the size and shape of the eyeorbits. The thickness of the soft tissue depends upon thedegree of development of the relief of the skull. As a rule, veryancient hominids possess fairly strong reliefs and this is takenInto account in reconstructing their features, but the same methodsand techniques are employed in reproducing the likenesses ofboth prehistoric and modern men.

I began working on a portrait of prehistoric man In 1937 andwe now have an entire gallery of portraits showing man's evo¬lution from the Lower to the Upper Palaeolithic period.

Reconstructions made from the skulls, of ancient forms of men,such as "Pithecanthropus" and "Sinanthropus", give clearevidence of the wide range of morphological variations and thecomplexity of human evolution. Study of early Neanderthaloldsand of classic Neanderthals, helps us to understand the mech¬

anisms which led to the beginnings and the development ofearly "sapiens" forms.

THE FACE-MAKERS (Continued)

THE TWO SKULLS

OF FRIEDRICH

SCHILLER

When the German poet Friedrich Schillerdied, In 1805, two deathmasks were made,one In plaster and one in terra-cotta, anda portrait drawn by Professor Jagelmann(Photo No. 5). In 1826, a skull (PhotoNo. 1) and skeleton were exhumed fromthe communal grave in which Schiller hadbeen burled and identified by his children,by Goethe and by Schwabe as Schiller's.Later serious doubts were raised and Itwas said that the skull was not Schiller's.

In 1911 an anatomist, Froriep, found ano¬ther skull (Photo No. 3) in the samecommon grave which he claimed was thetrue Schiller skull. In 1961, the GermanAcademy of Sciences In Berlin askedProfessor Gerasimov to use his techniqueof plastic reconstruction to determinewhich of the two skulls was authentic.

Photo No. 2 shows (a) Gerasimov'sreconstruction of the profile of the skull InPhoto No. 3 superimposed on (b) asilhouette In black of the profile of theskull in Photo No. 1. Photo No. 4 showsGerasimov's reconstruction of the 1826

skull (Photo No. 1) which confirms thatthis skull, recognized by Schiller's children,Goethe and Schwabe, was Indeed authentic.

The man

from La

Chapelle

5

Early attempts to reconstruct the fea¬tures of a Neanderthal man, whoseskull (Photo No. 3) was found at LaChapelle aux Saints, France, werebased on Imperfect methods and borelittle resemblance to each other (PhotosNos. 1, 2). The reconstruction (Photo

1

No. 4) by the French anthropologistMarcellin Boule, made more scienti¬fically by building up the basic musclesof the head, neck and torso on theassembled skeleton, shows consider¬able similarity to Professor Gerasimov'sreconstruction (Photo No. 5).

MAN, THE FIRST WALKIE-TALKIEContinued from page 58

giving the same record on an electro-myograph (a recording of muscularvibrations) as for spoken words. Sothe communication of information and

the formation of concepts supplementand control each other.

The combination - of percepts inconcepts and the expression of theirsymbol, the word, has become afunction of the speech organs becauseno other human organ can respondwith such versatility, accuracy andspeed to impulses from the cortex,without an excessive expenditure ofenergy and without interfering withany other motor activities.

Modern man can pronounce hun¬dreds of syllables a minute, each ofwhich requires a different use of thevocal chords, a different direction of

air expelled from the lungs and adifferent positioning of the tongue andthe mouth cavity. The whole systemof articulation can switch from one

position to the next in a fraction of asecond.

This mobility of the speech organsand the extremely flexible link-up ofconcepts are the result of a longevolution. To trace the steps in thisevolution scientists have studied the

different stages of man's increasinglycomplex mental activity, the structureof jaws and other parts of skeletonsin fossilized apes and hominids, andthe stone tools of prehistoric men.

No fossil records have been discov¬

ered of the first hominids who

systematically used stones and sticks.The cut stones of the Olduvai culture

(1.7 million years ago) show that togive a stone a pointed tip, the crafts¬men of that period chipped off severalirregularly-spaced pieces of differentsizes, which suggests that the Olduvaihominids were at an intermediarystage between concrete percepts andconcepts, or what are known as"general percepts".

Their vocal activity probably alsobelonged to an Intermediate stage.They inherited from their animalancestors audible signals consistingof single sounds, but instead ofreproducing these sounds automat¬ically they were already able to selectthem to a certain extent.

The earliest hominids had alreadymastered the art of making articulatedsounds and combining them in differ¬ent ways to form syllables, whichinitially remained unchanged. Thisearly form of articulate speech Iscalled the "lalia" stage (from theGreek word meaning to chatter orprattle).

Lalias were not used to exchangeideas or converse, but to stimulate

actions or to signal some importantevent in the life of the group. Theywere monosyllables with many mean¬ings and of course had no grammaticalstructure. Yet they possessed allthe basic properties of this type ofspeech: fixed enunciation of separatesounds and their combination into

syllables. (The capacity to combine

syllables and words did not comeuntil much later.)

Substantial progress in the develop¬ment of speech is Indicated by theshaped stones of the Acheuleanculture, which emerged some 200,000years ago. These were implements ofa definite form with regular facets cutall over the surface. To make a

primitive chopper it had been enoughto remember a sequence of four orfive blows, but to shape the Acheuleanimplements the craftsman had initiallyto have a clear idea both of the desir¬

ed final shape and of the sequenceof blows and other actions needed to

produce it.

The Acheulean implements reveal avaried and flexible combination of

percepts corresponding to the con¬ceptual stage of mental activity, thoughnaturally in rudimentary form, withoutany clear-cut distinctions betweenindividual percepts. True thoughtbecomes possible only when there Isa free combination of at least two

independent elements: the percept ofthe action and that of the object orsubject of the action; at the previousstage both aspects are fused.

Along with the flexible combinationof separate percepts, the Acheuleanhominids mastered the free combin¬

ation of syllables, forming words.Their fossilized remains show that

they possessed a larger brain thanthe earlier forms, as well as a lessmassive and shorter mandible. Be¬

cause of this shortening of the lowerjaw, the root of the tongue was lowerand the position of the larynx wasaltered, which meant that the air

current was no longer directed straightat the lips, but had now to overcomevarious barriers, notably the tongue.

The first words, still few and mainlymonosyllabic, related to materialobjects and basic facts in the livesof primitive peoples, particularly theirfood-gathering, and perhaps somepercepts with a magical meaning.New words were formed by doubling CQor Inverting syllables or by changes Uwin the pitch of some sounds. Firstmastered by one or several members

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

70

ORIGINS OF SPEECH (Continued)

of a group, they were adopted by thegroup as a whole if they supplied aneed, and then modified by practicaluse.

During the later Stone Age, thepaleoanthropes or Neanderthal mengradually enriched their vocabulary,but their intellectual faculties and

speech seem to have remained on thesame level of isolated words. A

major change took place at the endof the Stone Age, at the time of thefourth and final glacial period, whenthe direct ancestors of modern man,

(Homo sapiens), appeared, some50,000 to 30,000 years ago.

The brains of these early men wereabout the same size as those of their

predecessors, but their skull had ahigher vault and more rounded forms,especially the forehead and the backof the head. The lower jaw wassmaller, and the area of the muscleattachment was also reduced, aiding

rapid articulation. The muscle attach¬ments inside the lower jaw werealso similar to those of modern man,

while the bone on the outside had

grown forward to form a chin.

These Neolithic men had made

remarkable progress in stone-cuttingtechniques. More elaborate imple¬ments of many kinds were made,including bone articles and evenneedles. Ornamentation, sculpture,

drawing and painting were also widelydeveloped. The main occupation ofthese men was, of course, huntingwild animals.

So far as their technology, economyand arts were concerned, these

people of the last glacial period inEurope had a standard of living andway of life that were by no meansinferior to those of certain hunting

and food-gathering tribes still existingtoday. There is no doubt that theywere able to form paired combinationsof concepts and words (relating anaction to the object of the action).In other words, they had fully master¬ed articulate speech.

The emergence of Neolithic manwith his combination of separatewords with different meanings endsthe history of the origins of speechas a general human trait. The periodsthat followed saw the elaboration of

different speech systems or languageswith their own phonetic, lexical and

grammatical structures.

According to historical, archaeolo¬gical and linguistic research, the greatbasic language systems emerged inthe early Age of Metals some 6,000 to9,000 years ago, while the formationof many contemporary languages datesfrom historical times.

Victor Bunak

10 MAJOR CONCLUSIONSon the origin of Homo sapiens

1. Recent discoveries have upset the long-accepted time scale whichshowed a modern type of man emerging at around 35,000 B.C.These discoveries indicate the existence of men apparently of amodern type, not Neanderthals, over 60,000 years ago. These menexisted in Europe as well as in Africa, the Middle East and perhapsAsia.

2. The Mousterian culture, so called from artifacts found at LeMoustier in south-west France and dated to between 90,000 and35,000 years B.C., was formerly closely linked by anthropologiststo Neanderthal man. But Mousterian type artifacts have been foundat such places as Qafzeh, in Israel, and were not the work of Nean¬derthals but of a modern type of man.

3. Prehistoric tools, etc., of a type considered to be Upper Palaeo¬lithic, a period formerly dated from 35,000 B.C. to 9,000 B.C., havebeen found in Cyrenaica and Poland and shown, by carbon 14 datingmethods, to date from 38,000 B.C., that is overlapping the period ofNeanderthal man.

4. It therefore seems certain that modern type men and Neander¬thals coexisted for a number of years and that Upper Palaeolithicand Mousterian cultures overlapped In time.

5. The transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic seems to haveoccurred in a number of regions. Perhaps a proportion of theNeanderthal population evolved to something nearer to modern manand there may have been groups of modern type men in variousplaces whose stone industry,was Mousterian to start with and laterprogressed to Upper Palaeolithic. This is called the "polycentric"theory.

6. Anthropologists now seem to accept as definite that the classicEuropean Neanderthal man of the type found at La Chapelle-aux-

. Saints, in France, must be excluded from the direct ancestry ofmodern man.

7. It also now seems to be accepted that certain characteristics of"modern" man appeared separately or in various combinations atwidely different geographical points and at differing points on thetime scale. Fossil remains recently found at Orno, in Africa, forexample, support this view.

8. At the present stage of research a number of hypotheses aboutthe origins of modern man are possible.

According to conventional theory, "modern" man evolved in avast area comprising eastern Europe and western Asia from a non-specialized form of Neanderthaloid man. This theory is known as"diffuse monocentrism".

Dr. Leakey, however, suggests that a split occurred in the genus"Homo" in the Lower Pleistocene period (some 2-3 million years ago)with "Pithecanthropus" and Neanderthal man.

The majority of the anthropologists attending the Unesco Sympo¬sium accept the view that polycentric evolution is the most likelyexplanation for the occurrence of fossil human populations atdifferent times and places. It is not, however, maintained that alllines of descent contributed directly to the evolution of presentforms of man.

9. Proof that the early types of "modern" man and Neanderthaloidtypes are not different species may perhaps be found in the disco¬very in the Middle East of intermediary types, perhaps resulting fromcross-breeding. (Thoma's theory).

10. Some anthropologists accept the Idea that variations in environ¬ment and climate played an important part in the physical andcultural evolution of man In regions of extreme climate. Othersmaintain that physical evolution was determined by culture ratherthan by environment.

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Condensed from "The Origin of Homo sapiens"published by Unesco, 1972.

BOOKS IN ENGLISH FOR FURTHER READINGHistory of MankindCultural and Scientific DevelopmentVol. I, Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, By JacquettaHawkes and Sir Leonard WoolleySponsored by Unesco.George Allen and Unwin, London, 1963

The Origin of Homo SapiensProceedings of the Unesco Paris Symposium, Sept. 1969Edited by F. Bordes, Unesco, Paris, 1972

Valcamonica International Symposium on Prehistoric Art, 1968Published by the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistörici in co¬operation with Unesco, 1970(Papers in English, French, Italian, Spanish or German)

Catalogue of Reproductions of Paintings prior to 1860, 9th ed.(pages 354 to 361 on prehistoric art). Unesco 1972F. Bordes

The Old Stone Age. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1968.MacGraw Hill, N.Y., 1968

C.W. Ceram (Kurt W. Marek)The First American. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, N.Y., 1971

J.M. Coles and E.S. HiggsThe Archaeology of Early Man. Praeger, N.Y., 1969

J. Comas

Racial Myths. Unesco, 1968Manual of Physical Anthropology. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield,Mass.

CS. Coon

The Origin of Races. Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., 1963

F. Clark Howell

Ear/y Man (Life Nature Library). Time-Life Books, N.Y., 1970

W.W. Howells

Man in the Beginning. Bell, London, 1956

Mankind in the Making. Doubleday, N.Y., 1959The Distribution of Man. Freeman, San Francisco, 1960

Back of History, the Story of our Origins. American Museum ofNatural History and Doubleday, N.Y., 1963

L.S.B. Leakey

Olduvai Gorge. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1951Adam's Ancestors. Harper and Row, N.Y., 1960Olduvai Gorge 1951-1961. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965Stone Age Africa. Negro Univ. Press, N.Y., 1970Unveiling Man's Origins (with V.M. Goodall). Schenkman Publish¬ing Company, Cambridge, Mass., 1969; Methuen, London, 1970A. Leroi-Gourhan

The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe. Thames andHudson, London, 1967Prehistoric Man. Philosophical Library, N.Y., 1967Treasures of Prehistoric Art. H.N. Abrams, N.Y., 1968

D.J. MulvaneyThe Prehistory of Australia. Thames and Hudson, London, 1969

J. NapierA Handbook of Living Primates. London Academic Press, 1967The Origins of Man. MacGraw Hill, N.Y., 1969The Roots of Mankind. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970

K.P. OakleyMan the Tool-Maker. British Museum, London, 1956

D. Pilbeam

The Evolution of Man. Thames and Hudson, London, 1970

J.E. Pfeiffer

The Emergence of Man. Harper and Row, N.Y., 1969

S.A. Semenov

Prehistoric Technology. Cory, Adams and MacKay. London, 1964

J.S. Weiner

The Piltdown Forgery. Oxford Univ. Press, 1955

Gerhard Wichler

Charles Darwin, the Founder of the Theory of Evolution andNatural Selection. Pergamon Press, N.Y., 1961

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The hunter and bison of Lascaux

With its walls and ceilings covered by a vast panorama ofcoloured paintings, the Lascaux cave in south-west France,discovered in 1940, is a veritable "cathedral" of prehistoricart. Air exhaled by thousands of visitors speeded up erosionof the limestone walls, and the caves, closed to the publicin 1963, are unlikely to be reopened in the foreseeable future.In this remarkable hunting scene, a wounded bison with a

Photo © Jean Vertut, Paris

spear through its body (not shown here) rushes furiouslytowards a stick-figure man lying on the ground. Below theman is a mysterious bird-headed stick. Authorities are not

always agreed on the symbolic meaning of such Palaeolithiccave art, but its richness and variety help to convey some¬thing of the culture, thoughts and beliefs of men who livedsome 15 000 years ago.

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